The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University celebrated the 25th anniversary of its Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship in style earlier this week, honoring Western University Professor of English Dr. Joshua Schuster with the coveted prize for his 2023 book, What is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals.
Established in 1999 as a gift from Texas A&M graduate Melbern G. Glasscock ’59 to his wife, Susanne M. Glasscock, the Glasscock Book Prize is presented each year by the Glasscock Center in recognition of outstanding scholarship in the humanities with broad appeal to both academic and nonacademic audiences.
Schuster, who serves as director of the Centre for Theory and Criticism at Western, is also co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk and The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics, published in 2021 and 2015, respectively. His most recent work was chosen from among six books comprising this year’s Glasscock Humanities Book Prize finalists, earning him a cash prize and the opportunity to visit the Texas A&M campus to deliver a public lecture, presented Tuesday (Nov. 19) in the Memorial Student Center's Bethancourt Ballroom. He will also meet with various student and faculty groups during his stay in Aggieland.
The Glasscock Center plans to hold additional events throughout the academic year to showcase and celebrate Schuster's award-winning book, in which he posits that life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making because human activity is changing both the biology and meaning of extinction.
In writing What is Extinction?, Schuster examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction during the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events. Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, he proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty.
He says understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.
What is Extinction? delves into the development of last-animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.
For more information on this year’s Glasscock Book Prize recipient or additional books selected for this year's shortlist, please visit tx.ag/GCbookprize.
This story was originally published by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research.