2011 Human-Animal Studies Fellows
The Animals and Society Institute thanks the Summerlee Foundation for its major funding of this year's fellowship.
Joshua Russell is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. His dissertation, "On Lifetimes: Children's Experiences of Animal Death" incorporates narrative theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis to explore how children make meaning out of their relations with more-than-human beings. Prior to his PhD program, Joshua earned an MA in Environmental Conservation Education from New York University, and a BA in Psychology and Animal Behaviour from Canisius College.
Richie Nimmo is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. His research explores questions of ontology and epistemology in light of the hybridity and heterogeneity of social-material life. This often means critically examining how ‘the social’ and ‘the human’ are constituted through boundary-making practices on the human/nonhuman divide. Richie completed his PhD at Manchester in 2007, immediately taking up a lectureship in sociology at the University of Aberdeen, before returning to Manchester in 2009. His doctoral thesis drew upon actor-network theory to undertake a symmetrical history of dairy milk in Britain, with a focus upon the complex interaction of human and nonhuman agency. This became the basis of a book published by Routledge in 2010, entitled Milk, Modernity and the Making of the Human. He is Associate Editor of Cultural Sociology.
Elizabeth R. Johnson is a PhD Candidate in the Geography Program at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation, “Animating Futures, Reanimating Biopolitics: Animals, Technology, and Empire” explores the growing field of “biomimicry” in which biological life is re-engineered for technological production. She is most interested in the political and social implication of such techno-scientific transformations, exploring what happens to categories such as “labor” and “life” when processes of production become heavily reliant on nonhuman engineering. In addition to her research, Elizabeth is committed to issues of labor and education within and beyond the university.
Stephan Blatti (D.Phil, Oxford University) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. While his work incorporates topics in philosophical psychology (self-consciousness, animal cognition), aesthetics (ontology of art), and the philosophy of biology (dynamic systems), his primary area of research concerns several interrelated problems in contemporary metaphysics, viz. personal identity, material constitution, and death. He serves as Editor of The Southern Journal of Philosophy and is an affiliate faculty member of the Institute for Intelligent Systems. Stephan is founded through a generous grant from the Culture and Animals Foundation.
Alastair Hunt is assistant professor in the English Department at Portland State University in Oregon. His major research interests are British and European romantic literature, animal studies, political theory, and aesthetic theory. His current book project, The Romantic Rhetoric of the Human, considers the claims that European romanticism makes on the modern project of human rights. While human rights are normally thought to be the rights we have by virtue of being human, he suggests that, for romanticism, the acts by which rights are claimed reveal how the human is never simply itself. Originally from New Zealand, Alastair completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009.
Dr. Abebaw Gashaw was born in Debre Markos, Ethiopia, and studied for his DVM at Leipzig University, and received his Msc and PhD at Georg August University in Goettingen, Germany. He is an associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine at Jimma University, in Ethiopia. His research interests include diseases of cattle and ticks and tick-born diseases, as well as animal welfare in veterinary medicine. Abebaw is funded through a generous grant from The Humane Society of the United States.
Keridiana ("Kery") Chez is Ph.D. Candidate in English, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and holds a J.D. from N.Y.U. She has taught English at Queens and Citytech Colleges and Women's Studies at Brooklyn College. The working title of her dissertation is “The Affective Uses of Dogs: Humane Movements and Pet-Keeping in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century English and American Literature.” Kery is funded through a generous grant from the National Canine Research Council.
Kelly Enright is a writer and historian who makes her home in Vail, Colorado. She holds a PhD in American history from Rutgers University and a MA in museum anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author of Rhinoceros (Reaktion 2008), America’s Natural Places: Rocky Mountains & Great Plains (Greenwood 2010), and the forthcoming Osa & Martin: For the Love of Adventure (Lyons 2011). Her dissertation, Maximum of Wilderness: the Jungle in the American Imagination, is being published by University of Virginia Press in 2012. Enright has taught at Rutgers and Seton Hall universities, and consulted for museums and non-profits, including the Wildlife Conservation Society and the American Museum of Natural History.
