A love of animals and reading leads to dream master’s degree
By Kimberly Eaton
Jessica Robbins has loved animals for as long as she can remember. She got her first puppy, Molly, at the age of 6, and the two were the best of friends until Molly went to “puppy Heaven” six years later. Over the years, more dogs would find their way into her heart, but when she discovered cats, she realized that was the animal for her.
Robbins had always wanted a career that involved animals, but her tender heart could not bear the thought of seeing them hurt, so being a veterinarian was out of the question. Little did she know that she would be able to combine her two passions – animals and reading – as a graduate student at UAB.
“I’m not a scientist so I never thought I would be able to study animals, but I didn’t realize there were people out there who studied animals in literature,” Robbins said. “I wrote my first paper about animals when I was a freshman, and it was probably the most pretentious thing you could imagine. It was about how animals were mistreated and I was grossly misinformed. It is hard to find reliable research about this topic because it’s so polarized.”
Jessica Robbins earned a Master of Arts in English from UAB.The 23-year-old Birmingham native transferred to UAB from Bevill State as a junior and received her undergraduate degree in English. Her goal was to work in higher education, and she knew she needed a master’s degree in order to do that, so she applied to the Master of Arts program in English.
Robbins discovered animal studies theory when she first started at UAB and wanted to learn more, but there were no other classes devoted specifically to that topic. So, Robbins developed her own, with the help of Dr. Rebecca Bach. The two developed a reading list and projects for the different books, and built a syllabus based on those two things.
“I went into it thinking this was going to just be a normal course, except I would be the only student, but because it was mine to do whatever I wanted with, I got so much more out of it,” Robbins said.
Initially, Robbins was going to complete a midterm and final paper, but she posed the idea of writing a literature analysis for publication and her professor was “all for it.” Robbins focused her energy on finding something she liked and spent the whole semester researching and writing, in addition to keeping up with her actual reading list.
After some digging, she finally settled on using Richard Adams “Watership Down” for the basis of her literature analysis. The novel looks at the domestication of animals, but Robbins noticed conflicting views in the reading and decided to study those views more closely through the “lens of these theorists” she had been reading all semester.
“Essentially, what the novelist is saying is that domestication is complicated,” she said. “One of the arguments is that he’s redefining what domestication means. It’s more than just a human that takes an animal and makes it into a pet or something sterile for the home. It’s more like taking all kinds of animals – human and nonhuman alike – and bringing them into a space where they can co-habitat with one another, whether that’s a bunch of rabbits or rabbits and humans or rabbits and birds. It’s a way of learning how to co-habitat with another animal under a set of rules that the two parties have learned to live with together.”
Her literature analysis looked at parts of the novel and analyzed where the contradictions come up and how that aligns with the theories that focus on ways animals work in real life. She used three primary theorists in her paper – Donna Harraway, Kari Weil and Erica Fudge.
Robbins said she used Harraway a lot in her writing because she loves her work as a theorist. Harraway looks at the “messy history” of humans and dogs and says, “multi-species living is the game of getting along together.”
“It’s the process of getting along together and all of the nastiness and all of the learning that comes with that because it’s never a clean process to learn how to live with another animal, even if it’s your spouse or someone you think you know really well,” Robbins said. “I felt the novel ‘Watership Down’ really embodies that.”
Another theorist that she read and had a close connection to is Cary Wolfe, who proposes the idea of approaching all relationships with skepticism. Robbins said she has tried to use that approach with not only animals, but also humans.
“It’s essentially the idea that you can’t predict how any interaction is going to turn out before it happens,” she said. “I really like the idea of approaching everything with curiosity as opposed to thinking you’re superior to it just because you think you know more.”
While the bulk of her semester involved reading “Watership Down” and writing her literature analysis, Robbins also read a slew of other books, including “Animal Farm,” “The Bear,” “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” “Pride of Baghdad,” “Mastiff,” “The Open: Man and Animal,” some short stories and essays, “The Jungle Books” and more.
The result: an opportunity to present at a conference, which she was not expecting when she created the class, and, hopefully in the near future, a published paper. In addition, Robbins figured out her master’s thesis. Through reading “The Jungle Books” and “Tarzan of the Apes,” Robbins initially thought she would look at human behavior and human identity. The protagonists in each novel grows up in a world with animals and their identities change dramatically when they figure out they are actually human. However, her master’s thesis ended up being a little different from what she had originally planned. She decided to look at the ways in which the seal stories (“The White Seal” and “Quiquern”) in “The Jungle Books” push back against the idea of human exceptionalism. She defended her thesis and passed in April 2020.
“I really love reading children’s literature,” Robbins said. “There’s so much that children’s authors try to do with animals that’s weird and interesting. There’s just an endless amount of questions to ask, and the more I read, the more curious I become.”
Robbins is currently the Coordinator of Tutoring in the Learning Enrichment Center at the University of Montevallo. She manages and supervises the peer-tutoring program and helps students get connected to tutoring when they need it. While she was in graduate school at UAB, she had wonderful opportunities to work in both the writing center and in student-athlete support services, both of which prepared her tremendously for this position.