In 1826, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, sent a giraffe from the Sudan as a gift to the French king, Charles X. Later called “Zarafa,” she caused a sensation as the first live giraffe to set foot in France, and inspired scientists, artists, and members of the public, who visited her in the Menagerie of Paris. Zarafa died in 1845, but popular interest persisted. Her stuffed skin, which entered a museum in Verdun, became a talisman for French soldiers in World War I, while her mounted skeleton drew visitors at a museum in Caen until it was destroyed in a World War II bombing. Meanwhile, her species dwindled and went extinct in the Sudan itself.

In this month’s Balliol Online Lecture, Professor Heather J. Sharkey will consider how Zarafa’s life and afterlife can illuminate myriad histories, of contacts between Egypt, the Sudan, and France; science and environmental change; art and material culture; and human relationships with other animals.

Professor Heather J. Sharkey is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches Middle Eastern and North African history and where she won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. At Penn, she serves on the Executive Board of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. She is also a Consulting Scholar in the Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology).

She previously taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut. She was a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris during the 2012/2013 year.

She holds degrees from Yale (Anthropology, BA, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), the University of Durham (Middle Eastern Studies, MPhil), and Princeton (History, PhD). She has won many fellowships including the Marshall, Fulbright-Hays, and Carnegie.