Latva

Drawing on a range of sources, this book explores the historical relationship between sea animals and humans, demonstrating that far from being an age-old fear with its origins among seafarers, the conception of the giant squid as deep-sea monster evolved as a product of Enlightenment thinking in the work of zoologists and popular writers.

Otto Latva is a historian focusing on human-animal and human-plant studies as well as environmental history. He has studied widely the early modern as well as the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century societies and cultures. In his previous studies, Latva has especially investigated the shared history of humans and animals and the long-term understanding of the marine environment. He is currently working as a university lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. He also leads a research project Disappeared, Endangered and Newly Arrived Species: The Human Relationship with the Changing Biodiversity of the Baltic Sea (HumBio), funded by the Academy of Finland.