Rachel Mundy & Marion Thomas

Biography - Rachel Mundy

Rachel Mundy is an associate professor in the Arts, Culture and Media Department of Rutgers University-Newark (USA). She studies histories of nonhuman and animal song to ask how music has defined modern notions of rights, life, and worth. Her research brings together questions from sound studies, musicology, animal studies, the history of science, postcolonial history, and environmental history.

She received her doctorate in historical musicology from New York University in 2010 and has been granted previous fellowships by the American Musicological Society, Columbia University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University.

Because music-making has been heard in the West as evidence of an inner “soul” since the 19^th century, it has a foundational place in modern claims about personhood and human identity. Mundy explores these claims through cases that connect human rights to animal voices. Her first book Animal Musicalities (Wesleyan, 2018) has been credited with introducing an “animal turn” to the field of music studies.

Her second book, which she will work on in collaboration with faculty at the University of Strasbourg during the year 2025-2026, will illustrate how zoologists in the United States and Europe used musical listening skills to promote animal rights in the 1970s and 1980s. More broadly, she is interested in asking how foundational debates about how music defines rights, life, and worth have changed the values of humanism in an era of global climate change.

During her USIAS Fellowship, she will be hosted in the unit Society, Stakeholders and Governments in Europe (SAGE) at the University of Strasbourg.

Fellowship 2025

Dates - 01/09/2025-31/08/2027

Biography - Marion Thomas

Marion Thomas is associate professor of history of science at the University of Strasbourg in the unit Society, Stakeholders and Governments in Europe (SAGE). She specializes in the history of the modern life sciences, particularly animal behavior and primatology (focusing on animal intelligence, animal maternal instinct and animal societies), and more recently on animal history.

After training as an agronomical engineer, she completed a PhD in the history of science at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) in 2003. In 2022, she obtained the habilitation to conduct research (HDR) at the University of Strasbourg. She has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2019-2020), a visiting fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute für Wissenschaftgeschichte, Berlin (March 2015) and at the Maison Française d’Oxford (May-July 2021).

Marion Thomas is currently working on a project, which examines the place of primates in the medical and psychological sciences in the twentieth century. It focuses on the Pasteur Institute in Kindia, which was founded by the bacteriologist Albert Calmette in French Guinea in 1922, and became a state-of-the-art laboratory of simian medical experimentation and psychological research. A detailed study of the circulation of apes and knowledge between Paris, Guinea, and the United States aims to reassess the functioning of the Pasteur Institute at the heart of modern bioscience. Considering the possibility of an animal-centered history of the colonial and metropolitan Pasteur laboratories, it also aims to shed new light on the transnational, cultural, and scientific currents through which nonhuman primates traveled in the twentieth century, as well as to raise far-reaching questions about the role of race, gender, and colonialism in the history of medicine.

Her work on the histories of biology, primatology, and animal psychology has appeared in scholarly journals including Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Journal of the History of the Behavorial Sciences and Journal of the History of Biology.