Prof. Andy Robichaud Wins the Michael Katz Dissertation Prize of the Urban History Association
The Urban History Association has named Professor Andrew Robichaud the 2016 recipient of the Michael Katz Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in urban history completed in 2015. The citation for the award follows:
2016 Michael Katz Dissertation Award
Andrew Robichaud, “The Animal City: Remaking Human and Animal Lives in America, 1820-1910,” Stanford University, 2015.
As Andrew Robichaud noted, American cities were once full of a variety of domesticated, semi-domesticated, and undomesticated species of animals. By the early twentieth century, however, the range of human-animal relationships and the geography of certain animal populations in cities were utterly transformed. Robichaud’s elegantly written and painstaking researched dissertation reveals how changing relationships between human and animal populations re-made urban space, social life, and economies. He deftly reconstructs how human-animal relationships, centered around food, labor, companionship, and entertainment, intersected in unexpected ways with infrastructure, industrial development, urban planning, and social and legal reform. The dissertation creatively combines approaches drawn from urban and environmental history with those from new digital history methodologies, and makes a compelling case for taking non-human actors seriously as agents of historical change.