DINOSTALGIA
A MONUMENTAL RECKONING
WITH MODERN AMERICAN MONSTERS
Hello! I’m Alison.
I’m a cultural historian of extinction. I write, mainly, about dinosaurs, museum displays, and the more than human world.
I’ve spent the last decade hunting dinosaurs and other extinct animals in the archives. These days, I’m at work on a book I’m calling DINOSTALGIA. It’s a cultural history that traces how dinosaurs were made into cultural artifacts, consumer goods, and spokes-creatures for consumption.
I’m a historian by training and, according to Curbed Chicago, a "die-hard fan" of SUE the T. rex. As an instructor at Stanford (previously) and UC Santa Cruz (presently), I’ve taught a wide range of subjects, from storytelling to citizenship. I’ve also designed courses on animal history and extinction studies. For more on my background, see my CV.
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
A cougar cub playfully swipes at his mother’s tail in a habitat diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Cougars are native to Southern California. While these cats, put on display in the 1930s, are displayed at a distance, urbanization brings people and predators into increasing contact.
Coyotes, Cougars, Californians
At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, displays featuring local wildlife—coyotes and cougars—make it clear that while taxidermied animals are static, animal relations are ever changing. By focusing on changing ways of exhibiting species that are native to the region, this study traces how habitat dioramas define and revise boundaries of belonging.
In the 1930s, artist Charles R. Knight was dreaming up an outdoor dinosaur park in the Sunshine State, a place he argued was an environmental analog for the Mesozoic Era. He planned to bring life to his exhibit by including actual alligators alongside his extinct animal sculptures.
‘Alligators Enjoying the Florida Sunshine’, postmarked 3 April 1933. Charles R. Knight Papers, box 1, folder 6, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Pleistocene Park, and Other Designs on Deep Time in the Interwar United States
This article develops the concept of designs on deep time to explain how public displays of the planetary past circulate anything-but-neutral ideas about past and present to awed audiences. A comparative analysis of three different Depression-Era displays demonstrates that, despite disparate approaches, designers of deep time displays used the planetary past to legitimate present regimes and foster faith in human progress
At the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, dinosaurs abound. Behind this raptor, interpretative materials inform visitors that there are “different views” on dinosaurs “because of different starting points.” This message is repeated throughout the museum.
Of Dinosaurs and Intergenerational Culture Wars
Though long extinct, dinosaurs are significant figures in the ongoing U.S. culture wars, used by certain young earth creationists as “missionary lizards” to promote a biblically literal interpretation of the planetary past. This article analyzes how mainstream science and creation science museums alike leverage dinomania and nostalgia to draw crowds and create potent emotional experiences.
A Victorian Ichthyosaurus in need of repair. Plants have sprouted through cracks in its cement body.
A Discourse with Deep Time
The geological section of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, educated the Victorian public about the deep past while celebrating the scale and might of modernity, intimating that deep time had been domesticated, corralled and commoditized by the empire’s naturalists. Initially, the claim that extinct animals were aligned with British national heritage was a construction that matched the agenda of the Crystal Palace Company. Over time, the extinct animal models themselves (rather than the animals they represented) became historical artifacts recognized as heritage assets.
This fiberglass mammoth has been trapped in La Brea’s lake pit, trumpeting desperately, since the 1960s. Some visitors are distressed by the macabre scene. Others think on it with fondness as a relic of their own childhood visits to the park.
Out of Time at the La Brea Tar Pits
La Brea exclusively exhibits extinct animal models in the park, leading some visitors to see extinction events as existing at a safe distance. Yet the asphalt continues to entrap contemporary creatures. Uncomfortably close encounters with the bubbling tar cue visitors to situate themselves within an ecological continuum and convey the urgency of environmental issues at present.
An American flag waves over the personnel of the Central Asiatic Expedition in 1923. Though Roy Chapman Andrews boasted that this was an “All-American” expedition, Chinese men including Kan Chuen Pao and Liu Shih Ku were essential members of the team.
Photograph in Granger Papers, Vertebrate Paleontology Department Archives. American Museum of Natural History.
Archival Absence and Taxonomic Happenstance
This essay reflects on archival encounters with Kan Chuen Pao and Liu Shih Ku, field assistants for the Central Asiatic Expeditions. In the 1920s, at the height of Chinese exclusionary legislation, these men travelled to the United States to train as fossil preparators at the American Museum of Natural History. It is my contribution to Thinking with Moss, a digital humanities project led by Elaine Ayers, Ahmed Ansari, Tega Brain, and Laura Briscoe.
OTHER PROJECTS
A wind-ruffled kingfisher perched above the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz, California.
Nature Writing in a Rush
Academic publication tends to move at a glacial pace. So lately, I’ve been experimenting with shorter forms and new media to get words into the world more quickly. In February 2024, I contributed lyrics to a song-a-day project, largely inspired by the landscapes and life forms of Central California.
When Dinoland rolled into town, children came in droves. Some schools even organized field trips to see the dinosaurs.
Detail from Sinclair Oil Corporation Annual Report to the Shareholders for 1965, New York Public Library.
Finding Dinoland
In the 1960s, Sinclair Oil Company created a sensational exhibit of fiberglass dinosaurs called Dinoland, which debuted at the New York World's Fair in Queens and toured the United States as a traveling exhibit for years. The Finding Dinoland project is an attempt to make sense of a cultural phenomenon through surveys and interviews.