Nigel Rothfels

Education

• PhD, History, Harvard University, 1994
• MA, History, Harvard University, 1987
• BA, History, University of Utah, 1985

Courses Taught

• Hist 600 – Nonhuman History
• Hist 398 – Global History of Animals
• Hist 206 – Europe and the Modern World 

Teaching Interests

Rothfels is particularly interested in teaching courses on the presence and significance of animals in human history.  He also enjoys teaching Modern European History and History Methods courses. Because of his research, Rothfels has worked with a wide array of graduate students both at UWM and at other institutions.

Research Interests

Most of Rothfels' work has focused on the history of ideas about animals over the last few centuries. Publications have been focused in two areas: 1) the history of zoological gardens since the nineteenth century with a particular emphasis on the firm of Carl Hagenbeck in Germany; and 2) changing ideas about elephants since the eighteenth century.  His current research focuses on entomological discoveries in the South Pacific in the late nineteenth century. Broadly, Rothfels' work should be seen as part of the field of Animal Studies.

Related Activities

• Director, Office of Undergraduate Research
• General Editor, Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures with Penn State University Press

Biographical Sketch

Nigel Rothfels received a BA in history from the University of Utah and then an MA and PhD from Harvard University, where he wrote about the exotic animal trade in nineteenth-century Germany. In 1994, he came to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he began working as an editor at the then Center for Twentieth Century Studies.

A revision of his dissertation led to the book Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo, which traces the origins of naturalistic displays in zoological gardens. The focus of the book is on what is often called the “Hagenbeck revolution” — the innovative enclosures for animals developed by Carl Hagenbeck at his Tierpark in Stellingen, Germany. The book was published in Harriet Ritvo’s Animals, History, Culture series with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2002 and has gone through several printings. Rothfels is currently preparing a revised edition of the book. Also in 2002, Indiana University Press published Representing Animals, a cross-disciplinary collection Rothfels edited for the series Theories of Contemporary Culture. Representing Animals grew out of a year of research at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies and a conference I co-organized with the historian Andrew Isenberg. In 2012, Rothfels started a book series at Penn State University Press called Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures, and there are now twenty-two volumes are in print.  The seventh volume, Elephant House, was a collaboration between Rothfels and the photographer Dick Blau and focuses on the lives of elephants and their caregivers at an American zoo. In 2021, Johns Hopkins published Rothfels' Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures, a history of ideas about elephants in the West.

Most of Rothfels' career at UWM has been in the administration. In 2000, after working at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies for six years, Rothfels was named director of the Edison Initiative — a teaching and learning innovations unit in the College of Letters and Science at UWM. In 2008, Rothfels was then named director of a new Office of Undergraduate Research, a unit which received the Award for Undergraduate Research Accomplishment by the national Council on Undergraduate Research in 2018. In 2018, joined the History Department where he is now Professor. While teaching regularly for the History Department, Rothfels continues his work as Director of the Office Of Undergraduate Research.

Selected Publications