York University

Faculty Member, History

Assistant Professor

About

http://seankheraj.com
http://twitter.com/seankheraj

I am an assistant professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

My current research looks at the interrelationship between humans, non-human animals, and urbanization in Canada. Canadians built their major cities in the nineteenth century with animals in mind. They were places intended to facilitate symbiosis between people and their domestic animals and exclude wild animals. During the twentieth century, Canadians worked to extirpate most of their domestic animals from the urban environment (except for those used for pleasure or companionship). My research aims to understand how these historical changes in urban human-animal relations transformed cities and changed human ideas about their relationship with non-human nature.

My other major area of research interest is the study of historical conservation and parks policy to understand the role that people have played in creating protected natural spaces in Canada. In particular, my work on parks focuses on the interactions between human expectations of idealized wilderness and the volatile and unpredictable condition of complex ecosystems. My dissertation research examined the environmental history of Stanley Park to understand how this relationship between the ideal and the actual has affected public memory of this iconic protected park space.

I am also the producer and host of a monthly podcast on the environmental history community in Canada called Nature’s Past. New episodes are available every month at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast. You can follow the podcast on Twitter at http://twitter.com/naturespast

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