Collective Members
Hallie Abelman
Hallie Abelman (she/they) is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at the University of Iowa. Their research revolves around tactile representations of animals and the ways that we perform and move in their presence. Hallie comes to Iowa with a deep commitment to ecological theatre and the ways it can be used to de-legitimize renderings of animals that perpetuate racist or ableist practices and ideologies. They hold bachelor's degrees in Anthropology and Community Health from Tufts University (2014), an MFA in “illness arts” from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (NL), and a Performance Studies MA from NYU Tisch. Before moving to Iowa, Hallie worked as the studio manager for the Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo and the graduate research assistant to the ecological-theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri.
Nekeisha Alayna Alexis
Nekeisha Alayna Alexis is an independent scholar with wide-ranging interests in human and animal oppression, intersectionality, and co-liberation with other animals; and Christian ethics and theology concerning other animals. The Trinidad-native and long-time New Yorker resides in Elkhart, Indiana, where she is an administrator at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. She received her undergraduate degree with a concentration in Africana studies from New York University and Masters of Arts: Theological Studies from AMBS. Her most recent essay is “There’s Something About the Blood: Tactics of Evasion in Narratives of Violence” in Animaladies (Bloomsbury, 2018) and she is a contributor to Routledge Handbook on Animals(forthcoming, 2019). Locally, she co-organizes Black and Vegan: A Gathering (Vegan Michiana) and other justice-oriented initiatives. She enjoys performing with an African dance company and her band, rebel noire.
Christiane Bailey
Christiane Bailey is a philosopher working as coordinator of the Social Justice Centre at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec. She published the book « La philosophie à l’abattoir. Réflexions sur le bacon, l’empathie et l’éthique animale » (Atelier 10, 2018). She is a member of Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (APPLE) and the Observatoire québécois du droit animalier (OQDA). Her research focuses on animal rights, on the moral capacities of nonhuman animals, on ecofeminist approaches to animal liberation as well as on direct actions to help animals. For more information: https://christianebailey.com/
Matthew Calarco
Matthew Calarco is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, where he teaches a wide variety of courses in applied ethics and the history of philosophy. His research focuses on animal philosophy, Continental philosophy, environmental philosophy, social justice movements, and decolonial approaches to land and the more-than-human world. He is author of Beyond the Anthropological Difference (2019), Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction (2015), and Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (2008). He is currently at work on a book on the social and ontological significance of roadkill.
Pablo P. Castello
Pablo P. Castello is a Research Fellow of the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School. Drawing on his previous work on the relationship between visibility and political transformation, he is currently developing a book project that challenges the idea that “seeing is believing” and explores new ways to change people’s hearts and minds. Dr. Castello’s publication record includes several peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Biological Conservation, and Hypatia, as well as public media articles in outlets such as The Conversation and the Australian Broadcast Corporation.
Darren Chang
Darren Chang is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, and a member of the Multispecies Justice collective at the Sydney Environment Institute. His research interests broadly include interspecies relations under colonialism and global capitalism, practices of solidarity and mutual aid across species in challenging oppressive powers, and social movement theories. Darren's current research (co-supervised by Danielle Celermajer and Dinesh Wadiwel) explores how animal sanctuaries could be generative sites for the emergence of solidarity between animal liberation and decolonization, and for prefiguring just multispecies relations. Darren’s case study examining the tensions between Indigenous and animal advocacy struggles in the commercial seal hunt was published in Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (2020). Darren recently co-authored an article with Lauren Corman, titled “Multispecies Disposability,” which was published in a Special Topics issue of Animal Studies Journal on “Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Covid-19.”
Rosemary Collard
Rosemary Collard is a human geographer and political ecologist whose research aims to develop political economic explanations for what scientists call defaunation. She combines primary field research with critical theory – especially feminist and postcolonial political economy, environmental justice, ecofeminism, and animal studies – to investigate how colonialism and capitalism have shaped animal life and relations between people and animals, especially wildlife. She has an ongoing project tracking the global exotic pet trade, and a new project on woodland caribou extirpation. She is an assistant professor in geography at Simon Fraser University and an editor of the journal EPE: Nature and Space.
Lauren Corman
Lauren Corman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Brock University. She teaches in the areas of critical animal studies and contemporary social theory. Her early politics were forged in the crucible of the 90s Winnipeg punk scene and gender studies, catalyzing an enduring research interest in the racialized, classed, and gendered dynamics of slaughterhouse labour. Prior to Brock, she hosted the Animal Voices radio show, an animal advocacy program dedicated to social justice. She continues to interrogate “the question of the animal(s)” from intersectional, decolonial, and anti-capitalist perspectives. Her current foci include trauma, sociality, and interspecies subjectivity. She is working on a book about the complex histories of particularly vilified animals. She is the co-editor of Animal Subjects 2.0. and the first professor hired to specialize in critical animal studies.
Maneesha Deckha
Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include critical animal studies, animal law, postcolonial feminist theory, and reproductive law and policy. She is the author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (2021). She is widely published and has received multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and other funding bodies. She also held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University. She is currently completing a book project on feminism, postcolonialism and critical animal law and serves as the Director of the Animal Studies Research Initiative at the University of Victoria.
Jessica Eisen
Jessica Eisen is an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law. Her research interests include animals and the law, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, equality and antidiscrimination law, feminist legal theory, intergenerational justice, and law and social movements. Professor Eisen’s research has been published in Journal of Law and Equality, Animal Law Review, Canadian Journal of Poverty Law, Transnational Legal Theory, Queen’s Law Journal, ICON: International Journal of Constitutional Law, University of British Columbia Law Review, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, and elsewhere. Jessica is co-hosting the 2025 meeting of NAACAS at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law in Edmonton.
Angela Fernandez
Angela Fernandez is a full professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto where she is cross-appointed to the Department of History. She is supervisor of the Brooks Animal Law Digest: Canada Edition and works with the Bora Laskin Law Library on the Animal Law Research Guide. She co-authored (with Justin Marceau) “43 Lab Monkeys Escaped in South Carolina. They Have a Legal Claim to Freedom” Vox (11 November 2024) and discussed her book Pierson v. Post, the Hunt for the Fox: Law and Professionalization in American Legal Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018) shortly thereafter with Marc Bekoff for Psychology Today “Who Owns Animals After They Break Free and Taste Freedom. It’s Far More Complicated than Most People Realize” (17 November 2024). In 2024, she testified before two Canadian Senate Standing Committees on animal-related bills and led a submission at her university to government on the new Right to a Healthy Environment. She is currently working on a co-authored book on a late nineteenth-century Supreme Court of Canada over-fishing case (with Bradley Miller for UBC Press in their Landmark Cases in Canadian Law series).
Carrie Freeman
Carrie P. Freeman, PhD is an Associate Professor of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She publishes on media ethics, strategic communication for activists, environmental communication, and critical animal studies. Her 2014 book on vegan advocacy is Framing Farming: Communication Strategies for Animal Rights (www.framingfarming.com). Since the 1990’s, she has volunteered running and participating in grassroots animal rights and vegetarian groups, including being faculty advisor for her campus animal rights club. For almost a decade she has co-hosted animal and environmental protection shows on WRFG-Atlanta (Radio Free Georgia).With Dr. Debra Merskin, she co-authors the www.animalsandmedia.org styleguide for responsible media.
Kathryn Gillespie
Katie Gillespie, PhD is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Kentucky in the Department of Geography and the Applied Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program. Her work focuses on the harms done to other animals under regimes of capitalism and colonialism, as well as the possibilities for flourishing outside of these systems. She is the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 [University of Chicago Press, 2018] and has published in a range of scholarly journals, including Politics & Animals and Animal Studies Journal. She is the co-editor of Vulnerable Witness: The Politics of Grief in the Field, Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World, and Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death. Katie was an Animal Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University (2016-2018). She volunteers with Pigs Peace Sanctuary.
Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University. She is also a professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Science in Society, and coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies. She is the author and editor of 11 books. Her work lies at the intersection of ethical and political philosophy and practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, incarcerated people, non-human animals. Gruen has also documented the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US (http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu) and the journey to sanctuary of the remaining chimpanzees in research labs, The Last 1000 (http://last1000chimps.com).
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Her research has focused on the rhetoric of psychiatry, as well as on the practice of scientific and technical communication. Currently, she is interested in critical animal studies and in particular in veganism as an embodied social, political, and rhetorical practice. She is currently co-editing of a book on Vegetarian Arguments in Culture, Theory, and Practice: The V Word (with Palgrave, Animal Ethics Series) and working on several other projects on veg(etari)anism; orthorexia; and the intersection of rhetorical and animal studies.
Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond is Associate Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her publications on Critical Animal Studies and the legacies of African enslavement include “Haunting Pigs, Swimming Jaguars: Mourning, Animals and Ayahuasca” (2019), “Akbar Stole My Heart: Coming Out as an Animalist” (2013), and White Negritude: Race, Writing and Brazilian Cultural Identity (2008). Her current book project, “Home Sick,” blends theory with creative nonfiction to meditate on grief, end of life, the medical-industrial complex, Islamophobia and the commodification of (human and nonhuman) animals. In addition to her scholarly publications, she has written for popular media including The Advocate, CounterPunch, Ms. Magazine, Truthout and Persianesque.
Stephanie Jenkins
Dr. Stephanie C. Jenkins is an Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. She is the co-founder and former co-director of the Phronesis Lab for Engaged Ethics, as well as the current Director of the Oregon State University Disability Network. Her research and teaching interests include feminist philosophy, disability studies, critical animal studies, and ethics. In addition to publishing scholarly articles in moral philosophy, she is a co-editor of the book, Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (2020).
pattrice jones
pattrice jones is a cofounder of VINE Sanctuary, an LGBTQ-led farmed animal refuge working for social and environmental justice as well as animal liberation. pattrice's contributions to critical animal studies include one book -- The Oxen at the Intersection (2014) -- and numerous chapters in edited collections, including Animaladies (Gruen & Probyn-Ramsey, 2018), Animal Oppression and Capitalism (Nibert, 2017); Ecofeminism (Adams & Gruen, 2014); Sister Species (Kemmerer, 2011); Minding the Animal Psyche (Bradshaw, 2010); and Contemporary Anarchist Studies (2009) as well as articles in the journals Feminism & Psychology, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the Australasian Animal Studies Journal.
Claire Jean Kim
Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on human-animal studies and comparative race studies. She is the author of Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015) and “Murder and Matter in Harambe’s House” (2016). She was the co-editor of a special issue of American Quarterly, “Species/Race/Sex” (September 2013), and co-organizer of the Race and Animals Institute at Wesleyan University in 2016. She is currently working on a book on race, animals, and ecological crisis.
Aph Ko
Aph Ko is a writer and independent digital media producer. She is the founder of Black Vegans Rock and co-author of Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Aph also served as the Associate Producer for the documentary Always in Season, which won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury award for Moral Urgency at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019. She is also the author of the new book, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out.
Angela Lee
Angela Lee is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law in Toronto. Lee’s doctoral work develops a framework for "technology justice" in the context of Canada's agri-food sector. Her recent research examines the state of innovation policy in Canada, arguing that improved understanding and broadened conceptions of innovation are necessary in order to better direct innovation towards shared social and environmental ends. Lee teaches courses in Food Law and Animals and the Law. She is a co-editor of Food Law and Policy in Canada (Toronto: Carswell, 2019), and her research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Animal Studies Journal, the UBC Law Review, the Dalhousie Law Journal, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, the Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues, and Canadian Food Studies. She regularly shares her research at national and international fora. She is a board member of the Canadian Law and Society Association and a member of the Canadian Association of Food Law and Policy.
Tracy McDonald
Tracy McDonald is an associate professor of History at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Trained as an historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, and having worked in film and agrarian studies, her work now focuses on animals in a number of historical contexts. She has three current research projects. One is a study of the capture, transportation, and exhibition of exotic animals in the USSR, 1924-1964. The second looks at acclimatization of beaver and sea otters in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. And, the third, is a biography of a young gorilla (1911-1915).
Kelly Struthers Montford
Kelly Struthers Montford is Assistant Professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. Previously she was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, and before that a postdoctoral research fellow in punishment, law, and social theory at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. Kelly received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Alberta in 2017. Her research bridges settler colonial studies, punishment and captivity, animal studies, and law, and has been published in Radical Philosophy Review, the New Criminal Law Review, PhiloSophia, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Societies, and PhaenEx: Journal of Existentialist and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, among other venues. Jacques is featured with Kelly in the photo to the left, and can also be found in the photo of Dinesh Wadiwel below. Kelly is a co-founder of NAACAS and the current director. She hosted the first meeting of the society in Toronto in 2022.
Karen Morin
Karen M. Morin is Professor of Geography and Associate Provost at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Her interests span the history of geographical thought in North America, postcolonial geographies, carceral geographies, and critical animal studies. Most recently she authored Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals (2018), and is now at work on a project tentatively titled, Cattle Trails and Animal Lives: The Founding of an American Carceral Archipelago.
David Nibert
David Nibert is a professor of sociology at Wittenberg University where he teaches courses on the oppression of nonhuman animals and global injustice. He is the author of Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism and Global Conflict (Columbia University Press) and Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation (Rowman/Littlefield). He edited a two-volume book titled Animal Oppression and Capitalism, a work that includes chapters from 28 distinguished scholars and includes art by the renowned political artist Sue Coe (Praeger Press).
Timothy Pachirat
Timothy wrote Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (2013), Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power (2018), and contributed to Lori Gruen’s Critical Terms for Animal Studies (2018). At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Timothy teaches graduate seminars on Political Ethnography, Political Inquiry, and Distance, Deceit, and Denial as well as a large undergraduate general education lecture course on the organization and contestation of power across time and space.
Margaret Robinson
Margaret Robinson is a two-spirit L’nu scholar from Eskikewákik, and member of the Lennox Island First Nation. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and conducts community based research with Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people. Her research interests include the Indigenous New Wave art movement, non-status Indigenous identity, Mi’kmaw teaching methods, and food sovereignty. Margaret is a long time vegan who loves sunflower seeds and murder mysteries, and lives in Chezzetcook with her partner and four cats. She is an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University in the Departments of English and of Sociology & Social Anthropology and is an Affiliate Scientist at the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health in Toronto.
Vasile Stǎnescu
Vasile Stănescu is Associate Professor of Communication at Mercer University. Stănescu is co-senior editor of the Critical Animal Studies book series published by Rodopi/Brill, the former co-editor of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and former co-organizer of the Stanford Humanities Project. Stănescu is the author of over 20 peer-reviewed publications on critical animal studies. His current research interests include Critical Animal Studies, Posthumanism, food studies, decolonialism, environmental rhetoric, and the topic of in vitro meat. Stănescu regularly engages in public debates on issues related to critical animal studies and animal advocacy. Vasile had the idea to create the North American Association for Critical Animal Studies as a sister society of the European Association for Critical Animal Studies. He hosts the association’s FaceBook page and will be hosting the 2026 meeting of NAACAS in Atlanta, Georgia.
Alison Suen
Alison Suen is an associate professor of philosophy at Iona College, New York. She received her BA in Philosophy from University of Northern Iowa in 2006, and her PhD in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2012. In 2015 she published The Speaking Animal: Ethics, Language and the Human-animal Divide with Rowman and Littlefield International. Her articles have appeared in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, Teaching Philosophy, and Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. She is interested in various intersections between feminist philosophy and animal ethics. Inspired by her cat Linguini, she is currently working on a project on slackers.
Chloë Taylor
Chloë Taylor is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of three books on Foucault, and the co-editor with Hasana Sharp of Feminist Philosophies of Life (2016), with Neil Dalal of Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics (2014), with Stephanie Jenkins and Kelly Struthers Montford of Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (2020), and with Kelly Struthers Montford of Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (2020) and Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice (2021). With Kelly Struthers Montford and Eve Kasprzycka, Chloë also co-edited recent issues of Animal Studies Journal on Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Covid-19 (2021) and Critical Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction (2023). Most recently Chloë edited The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals (2024). She is currently working on a co-authored Anthropocene ABCs book and beginning a new book project, Philosophy and Cats. She is the co-founder of NAACAS and with her colleague Jessica Eisen is hosting the May 2025 meeting in Edmonton.
Sunaura Taylor
Sunaura Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an artist. She is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award, and Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (2024). Taylor has written for American Quarterly, New Labor Forum, Yes! Magazine and other outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. Taylor holds an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University.
Alex Ventimilla
Alex Ventimilla is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta whose research interests span across the environmental humanities. His doctoral research examines the politics of extinction with a focus on documentary representations of species conservation and biodiversity loss. His work has been published in Animal Studies Journal.
Dinesh Wadiwel
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel is Senior Lecturer, School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney. Dinesh is author of the monograph The War against Animals (Brill) and co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew of Foucault and Animals (Brill). He has had over 15 years experience working within civil society organisations, including in anti-poverty and disability rights roles.
Tayler Zavitz
Tayler Zavitz is a PhD candidate and sessional instructor in the Sociology department at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation, When Empathy Becomes a Crime: The Repression and Criminalization of the Animal Rights Movement in Canada, explores the historical and contemporary experiences of Canadian animal activists associated with their repression and criminalization. Tayler also holds a Masters degree in Critical Sociology, with a focus in Critical Animal Studies, from Brock University.