HOWLoween 2023: Celebrating National Wolf Awareness Week at Stanford Libraries

Submitted by the Event Organizer

National Wolf Awareness Week takes place on the third week of October and is intended to “celebrate the unique place of wolves in the animal kingdom and learn more about their threatened place in the natural world today.” This year will mark the third year of celebration at Stanford Libraries, after HOWLoween 2022 and HOWLoween 2021.

The goal of HOWLoween is to learn more about wolves, to examine the human fascination with wolves, and also to explore the meanings and characteristics that humans associate with wolves through various cultural forms of expression.

Program

1:00pm: “Introduction and welcome: The meanings of wolves”
Kathleen Smith (Curator, Germanic Collections & Medieval Studies, Stanford Libraries)

 “The wolf in Comanche folklore and tradition”
Weyodi Oldbear (Writer and Storyteller)

The wolf plays a very different role in Indigenous/Native American cultures than it does in Western European traditions such as fairy tales and accounts from the medieval to the present. This session will present some of the ways in which the wolf appears in Comanche tales and traditions.

2:00pm: “A wolf in the children’s hospital: Sculptures that tell stories”
Antonia Dapena-Tretter (Art Curator, Stanford Children’s Health)

Why is there a giant gray wolf sculpture in the middle of Stanford Children’s Health, a hospital for children facing serious illness? What does it mean to those around it, and how can we use this sculpture, and others, to explore stories of illness, resilience, and community?

Coffee Break

3:00pm“The Big Bold Wolf? A study to investigate personality in captive gray wolves (Canis lupus)”
Yasmeen Ghavamian (Animal Biology PhD Student, University of California, Davis) 

As part of ongoing research at the California Wolf Center and Oakland Zoo, this talk will provide an overview of animal personality research in addition to the methodology UC Davis researchers are using to assess personality in wolves, outcomes of animal care staff ratings of wolf personality, and the impacts this research holds for welfare and conservation.

4:00pm: Panel discussion among all speakers: “Telling wolf stories”

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.