Confirmed speakers are
Jacob Bull is a social and cultural geographer. Working with fish, ticks, cattle and bees his work focuses on the role of animals in understandings of space, place and identity. His previous research includes a PhD on recreational fishing in the Southwest of England, work on the EU WELFARE QUALITY ® project into farm animal welfare and a short project investigating agricultural identities in light of the social and cultural constructions of livestock farming. He is coordinator of the Humanimal Group, and is Lead applicant on the VR-funded project ‘Becoming human: gender theory and animals in a more-than-human world’ and the FORMAS-funded project ‘Changing animal bodies: breeding responses to environmental, economic and social pressures’. Jacob is part of the editorial collective for Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies and part of the editorial advisory board of Trace - Finnish journal for human-animal studies.
Erica Cudworth is Professor of Feminist Animal Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of East London, UK. Her research interests include complexity theory, gender, and human relations with non-human animals, particularly theoretical and political challenges to exclusive humanism. She is author of Environment and Society (Routledge, 2003), Developing Ecofeminist Theory (Palgrave, 2005) and Social Lives with Other Animals (Palgrave, 2011); co-author of The Modern State (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and Posthuman International Relations (Zed, 2011); and co-editor of Technology, Society and Inequality (Peter Lang, 2013), Anarchism and Animal Liberation (McFarland, 2015) and Posthuman Dialogues in International Relations (forthcoming, Routledge, 2017). Erika’s current projects are on animal companions and the messy nature of multi-species life. In addition, with her UEL colleague and long term writing partner Steve Hobden, she is working on the more-than-human way of war and on posthuman emancipation. Their new book, The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism, is to be published by Routledge in 2017.
Claire Jean Kim received her B.A. in Government from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. She is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies, social movements, and human-animal studies. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press 2000) won two awards from the American Political Science Association: the Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and the Best Book Award from the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity. Her second book, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press 2015), is also a recipient of a Best Book Award from the the APSA’s Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity. Dr. Kim was co-guest editor of a special issue of American Quarterly, “Species/Race/Sex” (September 2013) and has written numerous journal articles, book chapters, and essays. She is the recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
Ann-Sofie Lönngren is a Ph.D. (2008) and associate professor in literature (2014), currently working as a researcher and university professor at the Centre for Gender Research and the Department of Literature at Uppsala University. Her main interests include Nordic twentieth-century literature, animal studies, posthumanism, new materialism, interdisciplinarity, queer studies and intersectionality. These are all perspectives that are employed in her most recent monography, Following the Animal. Power, Agency, and Human-Animal Transformations in Modern, Northern European Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).
Andrea Petitt has a PhD (2016) in ’rural development’ from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences with the thesis Women’s cattle ownership in Botswana: rebranding gender relations? Andrea’s research interests revolve around gender, livestock and human-animal relations as well as methodological practices of participant observation. She is currently working at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in the project ‘Changing Animal Bodies’ focusing on what ideas and practices around breeding of organic chicken, traditional breed cattle and honey bees in Sweden can tell us about social, economic, political and environmental challenges. Previous peer reviewed publications include the article Cowboy masculinities in human-animal relations on a cattle ranch. Andrea is also engaged in an academia-art collaboration through the project “My cow”, she said together with Botswana based visual artist Ann Gollifer.
Pär Segerdahl is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University. His publications include Language Use: A Philosophical Investigation into the Basic Notions of Pragmatics (Macmillan, 1996); Kanzi’s Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language (Palgrave, 2005); and (as editor) Undisciplined Animals: Invitations to Animal Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). He has published papers on linguistic theory, conversation analysis, philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, ape language research, animal welfare, and gender theory. His work on these themes is held together by an overarching interest in the question of the nature of philosophy.
Eliza Steinbock is an Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden University’s Centre for the Arts in Society in The Netherlands. Eliza’s current project “Vital Art: Transgender Portraiture as Visual Activism” examines the worlds created in the visual arts to harbor at risk trans subjects and to critique their discrimination (funded by the Dutch Scientific Organization for Research). Recent publications on trans* cultural production, porn/sexualities and contemporary mediascapes include essays in the Journal of Homosexuality, Photography and Culture, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly with forthcoming essays in Spectator, Feminist Media Studies and in their co-edited special issue of Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities on “Tranimacies: Intimate Links between Animal and Trans* Studies” 22.2 (forthcoming in June 2017) with Marianna Szczygielska and Anthony Wagner. Please visit www.elizasteinbock.com for more information.
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is an ecologist, hydrologist, writer, and scholar of water. He works to transform cultures of water use grounded in waste, ignorance, and apathy into new water cultures rooted in renewed connections to local water sources and cycles. He is currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Karen Barad to explore queer, transgender, and decolonial possibilities for ecological science. In July 2017, he will join the faculty of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle as the assistant professor of equity and environmental justice. His academic writing has appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, ACME: an e-journal of Critical Geographies, and Local Environment and is forthcoming in Ecosphere, Water, Catalyst, and Water Resources Research. His books include Creating Rain Gardens (Timber Press, 2012) and Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull Press, 2007).
Wendy Woodward is Emerita Professor in English Literature at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in southern African Narratives (Wits University Press, 2008) and co-editor with Erika Lemmer of a Special Issue of Journal of Literary Studies: Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa (2014). She is also co-editor with Susan McHugh of Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges and the Arts—Animal Studies in Modern Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). She has written three volumes of poetry: Séance for the Body (Snailpress 1994); Love, Hades and other Animals (Protea, 2008) and A Saving Bannister (Modjadji 2015), and tries to live lightly in Cape Town with a palomino and a poodle.
Hyaesin Yoon is an assistant professor in the department of Gender Studies at Central European University. She is currently working on her book project Prosthetic Memories, which examines the ethics of embodied memory in an age of transnational mobility, virtual media, and biotechnology. Her research interests include transnational biopolitics, postcolonial feminism, critical animal studies, and literary and performance theories.