Location
Nash Lecture Theatre, King's College London
Join KCL’s Centre for Early Modern Studies for a talk with Dr. Surekha Davies on her newly published book Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025). Dr. Davies tells a history of how humans have created monsters out of one another, from ancient gods to generative AI.
Dr. Davies will give a lecture on the book. This will be followed by a conversation and audience Q&A with Dr. Philip Ball.
The talk will be followed by a reception in the Somerset Room.
Tickets: https://buytickets.at/centreforearlymodernstudies/1585851
Co-organised with KCL’s Medicine and the Making of Race project.
Humans: A Monstrous History
A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity’s present and future.
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein’s monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.
In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.
About the author
Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has written essays and reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.
About the chair
Dr. Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and How Life Works. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball was the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He lives in London.