This talk explores the cultural and environmental history of America’s obsession with sharks. As the historical epicenter of the nation’s whaling industry and the childhood summer home of Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, Nantucket has been a key location for human and shark entanglements across time.

This program is part of the Nantucket Historical Association's Spring Lecture Series at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.

Janet M Davis is Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author two award-winning books, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (2016), and The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (2002), as well as the editor of Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline (2008). Her article, “Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics of American Empire and Nation Building,” won the 2014 Constance Rourke Prize from the American Studies Association for the best article published in American Quarterly. She has won multiple teaching awards at UT and was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2017. She has written invited opinion pieces for the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets. Davis regularly serves as a public humanities consultant, including the award-winning two-part series, The Circus, which aired nationally on American Experience on PBS in 2018. She is currently researching and writing her new book, Sharkmania: A Transnational American History, which explores human and shark entanglements from the Age of Sail to the Jaws Age.