Where knowledge and science meet ethics and compassion

HAS Executive Committee

The HAS Executive Committee was formed in 2004, and is a group of scholars and other interested parties working to advance Human-Animal Studies. This rapidly growing interdisciplinary academic field examines the complex and multi-dimensional relationships between humans and other animals -- be those relationships real or virtual, historical or contemporary, factual or fictional, beneficial or detrimental. The Committee undertakes projects that focus on the institutional development of the field, as distinguished from direct support of research. Goals include the establishment of minors, majors, programs, and centers devoted to the field, and the HAS Fellowship Program. The Committee works under the auspices of the Animals and Society Institute.

The committee is made up of:

Margo DeMello has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and currently lectures at Central New Mexico Community College, teaching sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology. She also is the Executive Director of House Rabbit Society, an international rabbit rescue and education organization.

Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Low-Carb Vegetarian (2004), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment (2007), Feet and Footwear (2009), Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines (2010), Faces around the World (2012), Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (2012), and Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing (2012).

Beginning in the early-1980s, Eric Greene developed and graduated with the first undergraduate and graduate degrees in Animals & Culture Studies from Binghamton University and Vermont College, respectively, followed by advanced study in cultural anthropology at the New School for Social Research. In 1990, he pioneered the first animal studies program offered at an institution of higher education (Miami-Dade College). Designed to explore both, cross-cultural understandings of nonhuman animals and the complexities of our relationships with them, his work remains deeply rooted in ideals of social and environmental justice, and attends to the subjectivities of individual animals. Formerly, as an executive with health-based organizations, Greene secured over $25 million for programs he co-developed for underserved communities of color. His consulting services, EverGreene Consulting, advance local, national and international projects. Clients include the Animals and Society Institute (he also serves on their advisory council and editorial board of the journal Society & Animals). Additionally, he serves on the board of directors of the National Museum of Animals & Society. Greene is currently developing Family Spirals, an international think tank and capacity-building nonprofit addressing family cohesion, identity and trauma. Its division on 'families with animals' addresses linkages between pet abuse and other forms of family violence. It also hosts the Green Pet-Burial Society, which connects bereavement with conservation while advancing research on perceptions and practices concerning animal death.

Lori Gruen is Professor of Philosophy, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University. Her work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, non-human animals. She has published extensively on topics in ecofeminist ethics, animal ethics, and environmental philosophy. She is the author of two books on animal ethics, most recently Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011), the co-editor of four books, including the newly released second edition of Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics (Oxford, 2012), and is the author of dozens of articles and book chapters. She continues to work on her manuscript that explores the ethical and epistemological issues raised by human relations to captive chimpanzees. She is also working on two edited volumes, one on Ethics and Captivity, the other on Food Sustainability and Justice.

Cheryl Joseph is a professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, where she combined three of her passions---sociology, teaching, and animals---to create a major in Sociology with a concentration on Animals in Human Society. This four-year undergraduate degree, the only one of its kind in the nation, allows students to study the social aspects of the animal-human bond and to pursue related careers without the traditional biology or veterinary science degrees. Through a university partnership with several local shelters, sanctuaries, and educational centers students in this major are engaged in a two-semester internship which allows them to work directly with animals while mutually assisting people. Inspired by her dog, Ebony, to design this major, the two were co-instructors of the classes for several years. Now Beethoven has taken up his share of the responsibility on Ebony's behalf.

Cheryl works closely with professional sociological organizations where she frequently contributes her on-going research on the animal-human bond. She also writes, having currently submitted for publication a text titled, Putting Sociology to Work: Career Pursuits for Majors.

In her free time, Cheryl enjoys travel to such locales as Southeast Asia, South America, and most recently, Morocco. Beethoven enjoys sleeping and snuggling. Both enjoy long walks on the beach.

Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England, USA. All of her research and some of her teaching focus on literary, visual, and scientific stories of species. McHugh is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (2011), published in the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series, as well as Dog (2004), a volume in Reaktion Books' Animal series. She has published dozens of essays in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, and along with Garry Marvin she presently is co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2013). She serves as Managing Editor of the Humanities for Society & Animals, and is a member of the editorial boards of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, AustralAsian Animal Studies Journal, H-Animal Discussion Network, and Humanimalia: A Journal of Human-Animal Interface Studies. McHugh's ongoing research focuses on the intersections of biological and cultural extinction.

Robert Mitchell was raised in New Jersey in the US, where his parents indulgently let him raise hundreds of animals (fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals) in their home. He has researched cognition in dolphins, apes, dogs, and humans, and has published 6 edited books on animal-related topics including deception, pretense, self-awareness, anthropomorphism, spatial cognition, and ape cognition. He has previously published a monograph on scientific perceptions of apes, and is currently working on two books: one on the history of scientific uses of anthropomorphism to understand animals, and the other on the numerous theories attempting to explain sexual orientation. His most recent areas of interest are the play of sea lions in the Galpagos Islands and the function of people's laughter when playing with dogs.

Michael Noonan is Professor of Biology at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, and Founder and Chair of the Animal Behavior, Ecology and Conservation undergraduate major, as well as Founder and Director of the Anthrozoology Master's Degree program at Canisius. He also directs the Institute for the Study of Human-Animal Relations and the Canisius Ambassadors for Conservation.

Dr. Christina Risley-Curtiss, an associate professor of Social Work at Arizona State University has 20+ years of practice/management experience in both public health and child welfare. Her primary areas of research and current publications are in other animal-human relationships in child welfare, social work and diverse groups. Her social work elective course, Other Animal-Human Connections, won the HSUS 2004 Society and Animals New Course Award. She is a current member and past chair of The Arizona Humane LINK, a coalition of animal welfare and human service agencies and is a member of the National Humane Link Coalition. She has received grants from the Kenneth A. Scott Charitable Trust, a KeyBank Trust and the Animal Welfare Trust to develop an assessment and intervention program for children and youth who have abused animals (C.A.T.). She is a Fellow at the Oxford Centre on Animal Ethics, on the human-animal studies committee of Animals and Society Institute (ASI), a fellow for the University of Denver School Of Social Work Institute on Human-Animal Interactions, on the faculty of the Kerulos Center and a member of the National Link Coalition. She has presented at Oxford on the role of other animals in child welfare, at the American Humane Association Annual Conference on other animals and communities of color, at the Social Work Spirituality Conference on spirituality and other animals; at the first Veterinary Social Work Summit held in Knoxville, TN; and in Canada on assessment and treatment of animal abuse. In collaboration with ASI she has implemented on online professional development program to train masters level counselors to treat those who have abused other animals. She grew up on a farm in Connecticut, where her father and grandfather practiced veterinary medicine. She does hands-on rescue work including having volunteered to help animals during the Katrina rescue and she was a founding member of a TNR feral cat program at ASU. She currently lives in a trans-species cultural home with a number of cats and chickens, a dog and horse.

Carrie Rohman is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. Before coming to Lafayette, she taught for four years at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Dayton, her M.A. in English from Indiana University, and her Ph.D. in 20th-Century British Literature and Critical Theory from Indiana University. Over the course of her career, Professor Rohman has taught courses in British literature, especially the modernist period, the twentieth-century novel, performance studies, science fiction, and writing. She has also taught a variety of animal studies courses examining animals in literature, philosophy, culture, and technology. A number of her animal studies courses have included a service-learning component.

Her scholarship has primarily involved examining the question of the animal in 20th-century literature, with an eye toward the philosophical and ethical dimensions of that question. Thus her research interests have been in the areas of animal studies, modernism, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. She has published widely on animality in the work of writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Rebecca West, H. G. Wells, and Italo Calvino in journals such as American Literature, Criticism, and Mosaic. Her book, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia, 2009) examines the discourse of animality in modernist literature, taking into account the influences of Darwin and Freud in that period, and recent theoretical work on the species barrier. She has also co-edited with Kristin Czarnecki the collection Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers of the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson, 2011).

She is currently writing about the relationship between animality, aesthetics, and performance in twentieth-century literature, dance, and performance art. Carrie is a modern dancer and choreographer in her other life. She most recently performed with colleague Nandini Sikand in the concert Prana/Breath at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in New York City (March 2012).

Andrew Rowan

Andrew Rowan is president and CEO of Humane Society International, and serves as Chief International Officer and Chief Scientific Officer for The HSUS. He also serves as president of The HSUS Wildlife Land Trust board of directors. Rowan serves on the committees of several animal protection groups, including the World Society for the Protection of Animals, the advisory committee on animal testing for Royal Dutch Shell and the National Institutes of Health ad hoc advisory committee on chimpanzee sanctuaries. He has served in numerous other advisory and consultative roles, including as a member of the advisory committee on alternative methods in toxicology for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and of the National Research Council committee on the use of animals and alternatives in the generation of monoclonal antibodies.

Jeff Sebo holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Sociology from Texas Christian University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from New York University. He is currently Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in Animal Studies and Environmental Studies at New York University, where he teaches Animal Minds, Ethics and Animals, Political Theory and Animals, and Food, Animals, and the Environment. His research focuses on what it takes to be a moral agent and to have direct moral status. He explores these questions in the case of human beings by arguing that many human beings have multiple personalities, some of which are full moral agents and all of which have direct moral status. And he explores these questions in the case of nonhuman animals by arguing that many nonhuman animals are rational and self-aware in at least a minimal sense, and therefore count as moral agents in at least a minimal sense. Jeff has been a vegan and an animal rights advocate for over ten years now. He founded an animal rights organization as well as a trap-neuter-release program at Texas Christian University, has published work on animal ethics in Animal Liberation Philosophy & Policy, and has presented work on animal ethics at Georgetown University, New York University, Syracuse University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Jeff is thrilled to be able to continue this work now as part of the HAS Executive Committee.

Ken Shapiro earned his BA from Harvard University and his PhD in clinical psychology from Duke University. He is cofounder of Animals and Society Institute. He founded Psychologists for the Ethical treatment of Animals and the Society and Animals Forum. He is founder and editor of Society and Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies; cofounder and coeditor of Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science; and editor of the Human-Animal Studies book series. His most recent book is Animal Models of Human Psychology: Critique of Science, Ethics and Policy. He is one of the developers of AniCare and AniCare Child, the only psychological treatment models for animal abusers, and trains therapists throughout the country on the use of these models.

Nik Taylor received her Ph.D., 'Human-Animal Relations: A Sociological Respecification', from Manchester Metropolitan University in 1999. Since then she has researched issues such as links between human and animal directed violence, and humane education and animal assisted therapy. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University of South Australia. She has published widely on various aspects of human-animal relations and her books include Theorizing Animals: Re-Specifying Humanimal Relations (Brill Academic, 2011); Animals, Humans and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (Lantern Books, 2013), and Animals at Work: Identity Politics and Culture in Work with Animals (Brill Academic, 2013). Nik is the Managing Editor (Social Sciences) of Society & Animals; a charter scholar of the Animals and Society Institute; a member of the Human Animal Research Group at the University of Adelaide; a participant in the Australian Animals Study group, and an Associate Member of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury.

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