What do extinct animals behind museum glass have to tell us? This talk delves into the themes of the forthcoming book Ghosts Behind Glass, exploring how the stories and remains of the extinct continue to haunt and speak through natural history displays.

In the halls of natural history museums all over the world, you peer through the glass and come face-to-face with ghosts. These are real ghosts—presences that haunt us. Behind museum glass, the extinct dead are not just remembered; they live on as other presences.

In this Green Hour talk, I present the thinking behind my forthcoming book Ghosts Behind Glass (University of Chicago Press, 2025), which re-presents extinct animals through the stories told about them and their remains. This re-presenting (by which I mean helping something to be present again through their life history and body) allows the extinct in this book, these ghosts, to speak their own stories.