Professor Khapaeva Publishes New Book: Man-Eating Monsters, Anthropocentrism and Popular Culture

Posted August 8, 2019

Dr. Dina Khapaeva, a Professor of Russian at the School of Modern Languages, has recently announced the publication of her new book Man-Eating Monsters, Anthropocentrism and Popular Culture. A continuation of the Emerald Studies in Death and Culture series, the book explores whether recent representations of humans as food in popular culture characterize a unique moment in Western cultural history. Dr. Khapaeva further analyzes how previous epochs represented man-eating monsters, vampirism, and cannibalism. Cultural taboos are examined, analyzed and brought into perspective whilst we contemplate how humans as commodities can create a global atmosphere that creeps towards cannibalism as a norm.

This collective volume offers a unique perspective on how representations of food in popular culture challenge the concept of the human being. It includes the contributions of Jacque Lynn Foltyn (National University), Paul Freedman (Yale University), Sami Pihlström (University of Helsinki), Carol Senf (Georgia Institute of Technology), Svetlana Tcareva, (Yale University), Kelly Doyle, and (Kwantlen Polytechnic University). By bringing together an interdisciplinary team, including historians, philosophers, and scholars of cultural studies and literature, the book presents a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives and engages them in a dialogue that is sustained by several common approaches and themes. 

This book explores the possible links between the role played by the animal rights movement in problematizing the difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Its chapters also investigate the reasons that have prompted several trends in the social sciences and humanities to reject anthropocentrism and humanism, and present humans as consumable.

A truly interdisciplinary, ground-breaking resource, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the explorations of the ambiguous role that representations of food play in popular culture. It will be an essential reference work for students, researchers and scholars in cultural studies, food studies, film and media studies, communication studies, sociology, American studies and Russian studies.

Instead of looking at the relations between food, body, and culture, at the importance of food in contemporary culture, or the ways in which media images of food reach out to various constituencies and audiences, as some existing studies do, this collection is focused on the crucial question, of how and why popular culture representations diffuse the borders between monsters, people, and animals, and how this affects our ideas about what may and may not be eaten. The new book is set to be released November 2019. The volume is intended to the scholars and students interested in food studies,  anthropology, and cultural studies. 

Professor Dina Khapaeva's research comprises death studies, cultural studies, and historical memory. Among her several monographs, her most recent ones include The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (The University of Michigan Press, 2017), Nightmares: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013).