sex/gender/species

Karen Cardozo is currently LITS Scholar in Residence at Mount Holyoke College. She publishes on cultural studies of science, ethnic and literary studies, and meta-professional analysis.  Her current book project, Generic Engineering: Reforming American Studies, thinks by analogy about the problems of genetic engineering in big agribusiness and argues that under the market pressures of academic capitalism, institutions deploy the equivalent of generic engineering—the promulgation of increasingly homogenous values, forms, and practices that threatens academic biodiversity.

Sushmita Chatterjee, completed a dual-degree Ph.D. from the Departments of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University (May, 2009) and is currently teaching at Augustana College, Illinois. She is working on a book manuscript that studies post-9/11 identity politics through an examination of Art Spiegelman’s visual politics. She teaches and writes on democratic theory, visual politics, feminist theory, and postcolonial politics.

Emily Clark is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where she is currently completing her dissertation: “Unintelligible Bodies: Representing Non/Human Difference.” She works on contemporary literature (20th/21st century) alongside feminist theory, disability studies, critical animal studies, posthumanism, narrative and authorship studies. Her publications include an article forthcoming in Feminist Review.

Greta Gaard is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.  Her publications include Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Temple, 1993), Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (Temple, 1998), Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and a work of creative nonfiction, The Nature of Home (University of Arizona Press, 2007).  She has published in numerous journals and has been a central figure in cross-cultural, transnational ecofeminist praxis.  She currently serves on the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE).

María Elena García is Associate Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas program and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Her book, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru (Stanford, 2005) examines indigenous politics and multicultural activism in Peru. Her work has appeared in Latin American Perspectives, Anthropological Quarterly, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Anthropology Now. Her research and teaching interests focus on indigeneity, the production of alternative knowledge, the articulation of human and non-human struggles, and Latin American/Latin@ cultural politics. Her research in the coming years will be focused on thinking about the consequences and impact (on both human and non-human lives) of the commercialization of Andean animals.

Jenny Grubbs is a doctoral student at American University in Anthropology, specializing in Race, Gender, and Social Justice. Her past research includes an autoethnography about interning with Farm Sanctuary and a Marxist analysis of speciesism that argued for the inclusion of speciesism in intersectional feminist frameworks. Her current research expands on the intersectionality of oppression, the animal liberation movement, and the capitalist mode of production (ie. how alienation, commodification, and fetishization predicated on speciesism intersect with other forms of constructed privilege).

Alice J. Hovorka is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Canada. Her research program broadly explores human-environment relationships and is theoretically informed by feminist, poststructural and posthumanist perspectives. Her long-standing work on urbanization, gender and everyday life in southern Africa has given way to an interest in animals within the Botswana context. She teaches courses in geographical thought, methodology, and gender and environment issues; she is developing an undergraduate seminar exploring the lives of animals through interdisciplinary perspectives.

Stephanie Jenkins is a dual-PhD candidate in Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Penn State.  Her research and teaching interests include 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Disability Theory, Critical Animal Studies, and ethics. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Disabling Ethics: A Genealogy of Ability.”

Eric Jonas is a graduate student in Northwestern University’s doctoral program in Philosophy. His research interests include Derrida and deconstruction, 20th century French philosophy, feminist and queer theory and political philosophy.

Sandra Koelle completed a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in 2010, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities at Stanford University (joint appointment in Program in Modern Thought and Literature, Bill Lane Center for the American West, and Woods Institute for the Environment).  “Intimate Bureaucracies” expands on a chapter from her dissertation/book manuscript, which addresses the roles of transportation corridors in the politics of place and race in Idaho and Montana.

Ruth Lipschitz is a South African scholar who has taught art history at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Stellenbosch University.  She has published on the work of Edward Kienholz and has presented papers in South Africa and the United Kingdom on aspects of gender, race and history in the work of South African artists Nandipha Mntambo and Minnette Vári.  She is currently writing a PhD on skin and species in contemporary South African art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Susan McHugh is Associate Professor of English at the University of New England, where she teaches courses in animal studies and literary theory.  She is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines, forthcoming in the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series, as well as Dog, a volume in Reaktion Books’ Animal series.  Her essays have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and Literature and Medicine.  McHugh serves on the editorial boards of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Humanimalia: A Journal of Human-Animal Interface Studies, and Society & Animals.

James K. Stanescu is an adjunct professor for the Department of Communication Studies and Theatre and the Department of Philosophy at Mercer University, where he also works as the Director of Debate. He is a PhD candidate at Binghamton University (SUNY) in the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program finishing up a dissertation entitled, “The Abattoir of Humanity: The Birth of the Factory Farm.” He runs the blog Critical Animal at http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com.

Banu Subramaniam is associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is coeditor of Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001) and the forthcoming, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the social and cultural studies of science in the practice of science. Spanning the humanities, social sciences, and the biological sciences, her research is located at the intersections of biology, women’s studies, ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. Her current work focuses on the xenophobia and nativism that accompany frameworks on invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India.

Mary Trachsel is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa where she teaches courses in writing, ethics, and animal studies.  Her recent publications combine her longstanding interest in care-based ethics and human animal relationships.  “How to Do Things Without Words,” (In Arguments about Animals (Lexington, 2010) examines animal “whispering” as both a rhetorical and ethical construct .  “Human Uniqueness in the Age of Ape Language Research” (Society and Animals, 2010) analyzes the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of the interdisciplinary discussion of human uniqueness.

Traci Warkentin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Hunter College, City University of New York, and a member of the advisory board for the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities. Her research interests include human-animal relationships, animal ethics, feminist environmental ethics and epistemologies, applied phenomenology, environmental and geographic education, and animal geographies. She has conducted extensive fieldwork at sites of human-whale encounter in the U.S., Canada and Australia and is currently investigating the complex roles of direct experience with dolphins and informal learning in shaping human attitudes toward nature and other animals. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of her scholarship are recent publications in Ethics and the Environment, the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, AI & Society, entries in the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, as well as book chapters on decolonizing zoos, methods for studying animal minds, and whale agency in captivity.

Organizers

Lori Gruen is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University where she also chairs Philosophy and directs the Ethics in Society Project. She has published extensively on topics in in animal ethics, ecofeminist ethics and epistemology, environmental justice, and feminist philosophy. She is author of the forthcoming Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and is currently writing a book exploring the complex philosophical issues raised by our relations to captive chimpanzees.

Kari Weil is Visiting Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University. She has published widely on feminist theory, literary representations of gender (especially in France) and more recently, on theories and representations of animal otherness. Her book, Thinking Animals: An Introduction to Animal Studies is forthcoming from Columbia University Press and she is also at work on The Most Beautiful Conquest of Man¹ (sic): Horses, Gender and the Conquest of Animal Nature in Nineteenth-Century France. Her course, “Animal Subjects” which she taught at the California College of the Arts, won the United States Humane Society¹s “Best Course Award” for 2006.

Lori and Kari are the co-authors of “Teaching Difference: Sex, Gender Species” in Margo DeMello’s Teaching the Animal.