Humans: A Monstrous History

Surekha Davies's Humans: A Monstrous History reads the history of monster-making as a history of who gets to count as normal.

Davies traces how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how race, gender and nations were invented along the way. Her examples run from ancient gods and Frankenstein's monster to E.T. and generative AI. Her argument is that monster-making is about control. The University of California Press published it in February 2025 as a 336-page hardcover with ten color plates and forty black-and-white figures.

Davies is a British historian of science, art and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize and the Roland H. Bainton Prize. She has written essays and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science and Aeon.