Barbara J. King
Barbara J. King is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.
Recently, she has taken up writing about animal emotion and cognition more broadly, including in bison, farm animals, elephants and domestic pets, as well as primates.
King's most recent book is How Animals Grieve (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Her article "When Animals Mourn" in the July 2013 Scientific American has been chosen for inclusion in the 2014 anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing. King reviews non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement (London) and is at work on a new book about the choices we make in eating other animals. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in 2002.
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Anthropologist Barbara J. King reviews a new book that suggests domesticating the wolf gave early modern humans an extra edge in hunting that pushed Neanderthals to extinction. -
Sometimes our loved ones who suffer from dementia surprise us — and teach us new lessons, as commentator Barbara J. King found out this week. -
Humans haven't cornered the market on heroism. As anthropologist Barbara J. King notes, other animals ranging from dogs and cats to elephant seals and African pouched rats can win our hearts, too.
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Some people of faith claim that the world is meaningless without belief in God or gods or an afterlife. Commentator Barbara J. King says the view of some atheists is mirrored in two recent novels. -
Commentator Barbara J. King says the book Farmageddon offers useful advice on how to take a stand against industrialized animal farming in the fight to forge a better future for our planet. -
It's a captivating story: A young girl is abandoned deep in the forest and survives for years with only the help of monkeys. But can it be believed? Anthropologist Barbara J. King has her doubts. -
Patricia Wright arrived in the Amazon armed only with intense curiosity about secretive owl monkeys. She emerged from the jungle on a new life trajectory. Since that singular experience, she has gone on to become well known for her work with Lemurs in Madagascar. Commentator Barbara J. King interviews Wright about her new memoir. -
In Virginia last month, a transgendered person was made to leave a sex-segregated public bath because of customer complaints. Commentator Barbara J. King sees this discriminatory act as another example of the "born male-born female" dichotomy ingrained in our culture. -
In his new book, Jared Diamond describes how readily people in small-scale societies learn to speak many distinct languages. After reading Diamond's book, commentator Barbara J. King takes time to consider what we in the U.S. may lose in a sea of monolingualism.
