Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)
About this episode
Sadiah Qureshi discusses her book on the modern concept of extinction and its political implications.
Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? Extinction, Professor Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept—and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. Yet Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Penguin, 2025) shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from…
More episodes of New Books in Museum Studies
- Cleo Nisse, "Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting" (Princeton UP, 2026)
- Where Harlem Rests at the Woodlawn Cemetery
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the New Books in Museum Studies podcast page.