Vanished with Sadiah Qureshi

Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi

 Tuesday June 10 at 8am PT/ 11am ET/ 4pm BST

Join NACBS to discuss Sadiah Qureshi’s latest work, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction. Audra Mitchell will join Qureshi in conversation.

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"Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction?

Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept – and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable.

Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion.

Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future."

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Sadiah Qureshi is a historian of science, race, and empire. She currently holds a Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Her first book, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011), was a joint winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Award for best first book published in Victorian Studies. Her latest book, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, draws on the histories of science, race, genocide, empire, conservation, animals, and museums to explore how the very notion of extinction emerged, and shaped our understanding life on earth in the Anthropocene.  

Audra Mitchell is full professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University. Mitchell’s work studies how global structures of violence, power, and oppression shape ecological and political systems. They are the author or editor of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, including four books, along with dozens of blog posts, editorials, and other publications. Their latest book, Revenant Ecologies: Defying the Violence of Extinction – and Conservation was published in 2024 by the University of Minnesota Press.