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Around the world, relationships between people and horses have had a tremendous impact on the human story, forever changing ways of life from transport to communication, subsistence, and belief. Drawing together leading scholars and thinkers from around the world to share perspectives on the human-horse story, this symposium celebrates the release of the 2024 Eugene M. Kayden Book Prize Award winning book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History. This symposium will bring together one external invited speaker and six internal (CU community) speakers to talk about different aspects of horse culture, including three specialists in Asia (Dr. Stephanie Su, Dr. William Taylor, and Dr. Tamar McKee). The book at the heart of the symposium, Hoof Beats, is drawn from my own field research in Asia, and thematically focuses on Asian horse cultures in the deep past.

 

8:30am Welcome Remarks

8:35am ྟ(rTa) of Tibet: Tracing the Evolution of Horses on the Tibetan Plateau from Prayer to Protest – Tamar McKee, Center of the American West

9:00am The Heavenly, the Royal, and the Patriotic: The Changing Symbolism of Horses in Chinese Art – Stephanie Su, Art and Art History

9:30-9:45am Coffee Break

9:45am The Mounted Warrior: Contextualizing Human Osteological 'Riding' Markers – Lauren Hosek, Department of Anthropology

10:15am Odin the Horse Master: the Mythic Evidence of a Nordic Horse Cult and its Social Implications – Mathias Nordwig, Nordic Program, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

10:45-11:00am Coffee Break

11:00am Equids in the Old Oyo Empire, West Africa - Olumide Ojediran, Department of Anthropology

11:30am Animal Suffering, Anti-Cruelty Activism, and Equine Ventriloquism During the Great Horse Flu of 1872-1873 – Thomas Andrews, Center of the American West

12:00pm Seminar, The Strongest Riders in the World: Ancient Horsemanship as Modern Sport in Central Asia – Will Grant, author of The Last Ride of the Pony Express

1-2:30pm Lunch on Your Own

2:30pm Panel Discussion with All Symposium Participants, Q&A

4pm Discussant: Horses and the Human Story, from the Eurasian Steppes to the Great Plains  - William Taylor, Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Curator of Archaeology at the CU Museum of Natural History, author of Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, book signing

5:30pm Dinner on Your Own

7:30pm Keynote Lecture, Hoof Beats and the Humans in the Saddle: History, Culture, and Epistemology in a Distant Land -Akin Ogundiran, Northwestern University

*Speaking slots subject to confirmation

Free and Open to the Public

Made possible by the Kayden Book Award, the CU Museum of Natural History, the Center of the American West, and the Center for Asian Studies.

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