Professor Hornstein's lecture offers an overview of some of the key theoretical and methodological insights that inform her approach to art historical animal studies. She will then turn to her research on the nineteenth-century lion hunt as a site of encounter between European artistic modernity, French imperialism, and an unwitting group of Barbary lions who got caught up in it all. She considers the lion hunt as both a convention of European painting as well as a political motif that was directly related to French colonial expansion in North Africa, especially in the decades after the 1830 conquest. She also positions the circulation of the lion hunt as a figure of French visual culture in the context of the dramatic decline and eventual extinction of lion populations in North Africa in the late-nineteenth century.