Guest Editors’ Introduction

Kristen Guest is professor in the Department of English at the University of Northern British Columbia. For Broadview Press she has edited a teaching edition of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and, in collaboration with Monica Mattfeld, has published two co-edited collections, Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society and the Discourse of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity, and the Making of the Modern Horse (Routledge 2020), as well as a co-edited special issue of Humanimalia focused on breed. She is currently at work on a nationally-funded digital humanities project that will feature a series of open-access, online, educational exhibits focused on equine breed.

Monica Mattfeld is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia. She has written on the history of animal and human disability in “Animal” (Bloosmbury, 2021) and on horse-human relationships and performances of gender in Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State 2017). In collaboration with Kristen Guest, she has edited Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity, and the Making of the Modern Horse (Routledge 2020), Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity (University of Chicago Press 2019), and a special issue of Humanimalia focusing on breed. Mattfeld is currently working on Poor Jades (forthcoming from Palgrave, 2024), a monograph focusing on questions of equine disability and welfare in the eighteenth century.