General principles, as to the cow being a machine for the production of milk, she looked on with suspicion.

Dear friends of AnimalFarm,

Welcome to issue no. 2 of The AnimalFarm Dispatch!

I am writing these words, as I often do, from a train traveling from Bologna to Turin, cutting through the agricultural fields of animal feed and the swine warehouses of the Po Valley—or perhaps, the zootechnical valley. A rather bleak view from the window:

The past few weeks have been quite hectic, but as always, I have some news to share to keep you up to date with the project’s activities.

Recruiting

The deadline for the first PhD position closed on Thursday, April 30. Two more positions will be launched in October 2026 and January 2027.

Soonish (with soon being a temporal category shaped by the administrative maze of Italian academia), the first postdoctoral position in the history of science/critical animal studies will be announced. More updates in the next dispatch—hopefully (hope being another very useful category).

News from the farm

First things first: on April 22, the exhibition Convivium: Food Systems at the Limit opened at the Architekturmuseum der TUM. Curated by Andjelka Badnjar and Andres Lepik, it will run until October 18 and offers a very honest portrayal of the controversies surrounding global capitalist food systems.

Víctor Muñoz Sanz and I contributed by co-curating a section titled The Animal Is Present (please forgive us, Marina Abramović), focusing on the buildings, bodies, and materialities of industrial dairy farming. We ask: where do cows live? What does their environment look like?

We had a great time at the opening, and it was thrilling to see so many people at the museum. Here are a few photos—do get in touch if you visit the exhibition, I would love to hear your feedback.

On a smaller note: if you understand Italian, I was briefly interviewed on Swiss radio by Cristiana Coletti—many thanks to her for the kind invitation!

Looking ahead, the first AnimalFarm seminar series is starting soon. I am grateful to Andrea Bagnato, Mariachiara Ficarelli, and Lisa Carignani for accepting my invitation. You can find the program here: all talks will be held in person at the Castello del Valentino or online via Zoom.

An opportunity for PhD candidates, wherever you are: please consider applying for the second edition of the Castello del Valentino Dialogues, an international workshop on multispecies voices, architectural history archives, and academic writing (September 9–11, 2026). The deadline is May 11.

More upcoming academic events I am co-organizing with my brilliant colleague and friend Víctor Muñoz Sanz:

Last but not least, AnimalFarm is almost ready to launch its website. It is currently in the careful graphic and development hands of Kees De Klein and Instance Studio, and I am very excited to share our new logo with you. A distinctly bookish logo, inspired by the many agrarian and zootechnical texts I have explored over the years.

It features a footnote in the form of a rotated A, recalling both the origins of the letter aleph (from the head of an ox) and the “for all” symbol in mathematics—a reminder to consider all animals as companions on this Earth.

Currently on our table (AnimalFarm doesn’t eat meat—but books)

One of the perks of recently moving between apartments has been realizing how many books I own—many of which I thought I did not have, had forgotten I had read, or even own in duplicate. While putting them back on new shelves, I felt both the joy of rediscovering books that have meant a lot to me and the embarrassment of having forgotten them.

It was especially nice to come across my old paperback copy of De esu carnium by Plutarch, which can be read online in English translation. Here is how his fragmented speech, dating back to the first–second century, begins:

“Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras⁠ had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man⁠ who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale⁠ bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?”

And finally, I am still enjoying my slow reading of Anna Karenina these days. Apparently, Tolstoy had a fascination with cows and may have questioned—through the thoughts of Darya (Dolly)—the idea that they are merely machines for producing milk:

“And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to Darya Alexandrovna the theory of cow-keeping, based on the principle that the cow is simply a machine for the transformation of food into milk, and so on. […] General principles, as to the cow being a machine for the production of milk, she looked on with suspicion. It seemed to her that such principles could only be a hindrance in farm management. It all seemed to her a far simpler matter: all that was needed, as Marya Philimonovna had explained, was to give Brindle and Whitebreast more food and drink, and not to let the cook carry all the kitchen slops to the laundry maid’s cow. That was clear. But general propositions as to feeding on meal and on grass were doubtful and obscure.”

Until next time,

Sofia/ERC AnimalFarm

Cover image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)