The Last Animal: Human History from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction

When: Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Where: LOCATION TBD
In-person registration

Renowned historian Kyle Harper brings a distinctive combination of science and history that integrates the latest in ecology, evolution, and Earth science to provide a panoramic view of the human past. In this discussion of his latest book, The Last Animal, Harper puts the human impact on animal biodiversity in historical perspective. Against the backdrop of migrations and empires, wars and revolutions, and the march of technological progress, Harper tells the epic story of the human ability to manipulate nature, how this has transformed the world we inhabit, and the opportunities and dangers presented by this fundamental element of our success.

Speaker:
Kyle Harper is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics and Letters, and Provost Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. Harper has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, in addition to a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He is a historian whose work integrates the natural sciences into the study of the human past. His main interests include the history of infectious disease and climate change and their impact on the long-run transformation of societies. More broadly, he writes on the history of humans as agents of ecological change and asks how we can approach questions such as biodiversity, health, and environmental sustainability from a historical perspective. He is the author of four books, most recently The Last Animal. He received his BA from the University of Oklahoma and an MA and PhD from Harvard University.