GALA ARGENT is an adjunct assistant professor in anthropology at Sacramento City College and in the animal studies program at Eastern Kentucky University. She is currently editing a multidisciplinary volume that examines, through time and across diverse societies, the manner in which humans and horses might be seen to construct mutually interdependent selves, identities, and cultural realities. She is a lifelong equestrienne.
ROB BODDICE is COFUND Fellow of the Languages of Emotion Excellence Cluster, Freie Universität, Berlin. He is author of A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Edwin Mellen, 2009) and editor of a collection entitled Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments (Brill, 2011). He is currently working on a history of compassion in the context of early Darwinism.
ALBERT BRAZ is an associate professor of comparative literature and English and the director of the comparative literature program at the University of Alberta. He is the author of The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2003) and is currently finishing a book on Grey Owl as writer and myth.
JANE C. DESMOND is professor of anthropology and affiliated faculty in gender and women’s studies and in the unit for criticism and theory at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. She is also director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies. A specialist in American studies, performance studies, tourism, public display, and embodiment, she has applied these interests to human-animal relations. Her first book is Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (University of Chicago Press, 1999); her current book project, “Displaying Death/Animating Life,” explores animal issues in engineering, art, and mourning.
KAREN DAVIS is the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate treatment of domestic fowl and maintains a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Her articles have appeared in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, Sister Species, and the Encyclopedia of Animals and Humans. Her several books include Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (Book Publishing, 2009) and More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality (Lantern, 2001).
DAVID DILLARD-WRIGHT is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, Aiken. His book Ark of the Possible: The Animal World in Merleau-Ponty (Lexington, 2009) explores issues of mind and animal ethics. He has received research fellowships from the Animals and Society Institute and the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life. His articles can be found in Society and Animals and Janus Head.
PAULA DROEGE is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. Her research on philosophical theories of consciousness proposes an essential role for temporal representation in conscious states. She is the author of Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness (John Benjamins, 2003) and several articles on consciousness theory.
JOHN FRASER is a conservation psychologist, educator, and architect. He is currently president and CEO of New Knowledge Organization, an entrepreneurial think tank devoted to understanding how people develop knowledge and collaborate on solving society’s significant challenges. His research has focused on understanding animal cognition, the expansion of the scope of justice to include wildlife, and the impact of social perspectives on degrees of concern afforded different species.
BENJAMIN L. HART is distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis. His work on animal behavior in species ranging from cats to elephants has led to more than 180 research publications. He has studied cognitive behavior of elephants in India and Africa with colleague Lynette Hart, which has led to scientific publications on the importance of the huge brain of elephants, particularly its relation to their cognition, long-term memory, and social-empathic behavior.
LYNETTE A. HART is professor of human-animal interactions and animal behavior at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine. In addition to research on large mammals with Benjamin Hart, she spearheads studies of psychosocial effects of companion animals for people. Assistance dogs and companion cats currently are a special emphasis, such as for children with autism or persons with other types of disabilities.
BRIAN M. LOWE is associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Oneonta. He is the author of Emerging Moral Vocabularies: The Creation and Establishment of New Forms of Moral and Ethical Meanings (Lexington, 2006), a contributor to The Sociology of Morality Handbook (Sage, 2010), and the author of several articles on topics such as civil religion and qualitative methodology. In 2008–2009 he served as chair of the Animals and Society section of the American Sociological Association. His current research involves the utilization of visual media by contemporary animal advocates.
ROBERT W. LURZ is professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He has written a number of articles on philosophical issues related to animal consciousness and mindreading. His books include The Philosophy of Animal Minds (Cambridge, 2009) and Mindreading Animals: The Debate Over What Animals Know About Other Minds (MIT Press, 2011).
ROBERT W. MITCHELL is Foundation Professor in the Department of Psychology and coordinator of the animal studies program at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the editor of Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and the coeditor of Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space (Cambridge University Press, 2010), The Mentalities of Gorillas and Orangutans: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals (SUNY Press, 1997), and Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1994). His research publications focus on animal cognition and social cognition.
ALAIN MORIN is associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Mount Royal University in Alberta, Canada. His research concerns the cognitive basis of self-awareness, with an emphasis on inner speech. He has published extensively on the topics of self-recognition, the localization of the self in the brain, the split brain phenomenon, neurophilosophy, fame and self-destruction, and the antecedents of self-consciousness. His most recent work includes papers in Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
DIANA REISS is a cognitive psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College and the biopsychology and behavioral neuroscience graduate program of CUNY. As a research scientist, she directs a program on dolphin cognition and communication at the National Aquarium and investigates elephant cognition at Smithsonian’s National Zoo. She and her colleagues demonstrated that dolphins and elephants share the ability with humans for mirror self-recognition. Her work has been widely published in international scientific journals as well as popular media outlets. She served as scientific adviser to the 2009 documentary The Cove.
CARRIE ROHMAN is assistant professor of English at Lafayette College. Her research interests include animal studies, modernism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, and aesthetics. Her essays have appeared in such journals as American Literature, Criticism, and Mosaic. Her book, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia University Press, 2009), examines the discourse of animality in modernist literature. She coedited Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers of the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Digital Press, 2011). She is currently writing about animality and aesthetics in twentieth-century literature, dance, and performance art.
JULIA SCHLOSSER is a Los Angeles–based artist, art historian, and educator. Her artwork and writing elucidate the multilayered relationships between people and their pets. She was a presenter at Animals and Aesthetics, Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, 2011. Recent photographs and videos were seen at the Seminário Internacional Arte e Natureza (International symposium on art and nature), São Paulo, Brazil, and Tierperspektiven (Animal perspectives), Souterrain Gallery, Berlin, Germany. Currently she is a lecturer at California State University, North-ridge and California State University, Los Angeles, where she teaches the practice and history of photography and writing and critical theory in the arts.
JESSICA SICKLER is a senior research associate at the Institute for Learning Innovation. She has a background in museum education, research, and evaluation. Her research interests include positive youth development, public engagement with science, and public understanding of animal cognition. She has served as adjunct faculty at Bank Street College of Education and Seton Hall University and is currently on the board of directors of the Visitor Studies Association. Her publications have appeared in Leisure Studies, Society and Animals, Curator: The Museum Journal, Visitor Studies, Journal of Interpretation Research, International Zoo Yearbook, and State of the Wild, 2008–2009.
JULIE A. SMITH is associate professor emeritus of the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. Her animal-related academic articles focus on representations of animals’ minds in literary works and understandings of rabbit minds within the rabbit rescue community. She is active in animal rights and rescue and she founded the Wisconsin chapter of the House Rabbit Society. She regularly writes for popular publications, including the House Rabbit Journal.
GARY STEINER is John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University. He is the author of Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism (Prometheus/Humanity, 2004), Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship (Columbia University Press, 2008), and Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (Columbia University Press, 2012).
JESSICA ULLRICH is a member of the Faculty of Fine Arts in the Department of Art History and Aesthetics at the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. She has curated fifteen art exhibitions on modern and contemporary art, including five on animals in art, and written the exhibition catalogs. She coedited Ich, das Tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in der Kulturgeschichte (I, the animal: Animals as personalities in cultural history) (Reimer, 2008) and is the editor of Tierstudien, the first journal on animal studies in Germany. Her current research interest is human-animal relationships in art, and she is working on her second book on live animals and aesthetics.
SARA WALLER is an associate professor of philosophy at Montana State University. She researches consciousness and the intersection of philosophy, neurology, and cognitive science with an emphasis on animal minds. Her empirical research focuses on the conceptual structures and communication of social predators (coyotes and dolphins). She has published in Synthese and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Her edited collection is entitled Serial Killers: Philosophy for Everyone (Blackwell, 2010). She is currently focusing on the human fear of death and cultural notions of animality.
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, environmental and geographic education, and animal and cultural geographies.