Animal Studies Research Group

Rachel Bailey

• Dr Tom Baxter

Business & Economics.

• Assoc Prof Aidan Davison

Geography. Aidan Davison is an Associate Professor of human geography. He is interested in nondualistic understandings of the interplay of culture and nature, especially as they are embodied in human-animal and human-plant relationships. He as published widely on the socio-ecology of the urban forest and has researched been involved in a project exploring human-horse relationships in Australian thoroughbred racing.

Malcolm Caulfield

Law. Malcolm has worked with and for Animals Australia. He is Principal Lawyer at the Animal Law Institute, and has written various animal stuff. At the moment he is writing a new version of his old book - the working title is 'Use and Abuse of Animals in Australia'. Malcolm is also heading back in the scientific direction, largely focusing on criticism and exposure of poor animal welfare science in Australia.

• Assoc Prof Penny Edmonds

History.

• Carol Freeman

English. Dr Carol Freeman has a long association with the University of Tasmania and is currently an Adjunct Researcher in the School of Humanities. She has been awarded prizes in English and History and a University Medal. She was involved in the formation and development of the field of Animal Studies as a founding member, committee member and conference organiser for the Australian Animal Studies Group (now the Australasian Animal Studies Association). She was editor of the internationally distributed Australian Animal Studies News Bulletin from 2008-2013. Carol’s research has focused on representations of animals in literature, film, popular culture and wildlife documentaries, where she has sought to bridge the gap between scientific approaches to animals and new research in the humanities and social sciences that emphasises human-animal relations.

• Dr Eliza Goddard

Philosophy.

• Meg Good

Law. Dr Meg Good is an Adjunct Lecturer with the Faculty of Law at the University of Tasmania. Meg holds a BA LLB (First Class Hons in Law) and PhD from UTAS. She currently works at Voiceless, the animal protection institute, and holds voluntary positions as the Tasmanian Co-ordinator of the Barristers Animal Welfare Panel (former National Co-ordinator), the Director of Education at the Animal Law Institute, and the Chief Editor of the Australian Animal Protection Law Journal. She created and co-ordinated Tasmania's first animal law conference in 2013, and was the inaugural recipient of the RSPCA Australia Sybil Emslie Animal Law Scholarship in 2016. She has guest lectured in animal law at various universities (including Latrobe University and the University of Melbourne), and will be co-ordinating the 2017 'Animal Law' unit at UTAS in Second Semester 2017. Whilst most of her research to date is in the field of environmental law and environmental human rights, she is currently in the process of co-authoring a national animal law text.

• Megan Hancock

History and Classics. Megan is in her third year of her PhD Candidature in the department of Classics, writing on the works of the satirist Lucian. Her research focuses upon Lucian’s use of the Aesopic fable as a tool to critique the pseudo-philosophers of the 2nd Century AD. Her work primarily engages with the literary characteristics of the animal fable, and assesses the presence of these traits in Lucian’s work, namely zoomorphism, the attribution of animals with human language and incidences of the strong succumbing to the 'traditionally' weak.

Erin Hortle

English. Erin is a creative writing PhD student at the University of Tasmania, working on a novel tentatively titled, The Octopus and I. The novel is composed of a series of interconnecting stories, narrated both by its human characters and the nonhuman animals they encounter in the course of the story’s action. Through its formal and thematic exploration of anthropomorphism, the novel contemplates what humans miss when they’re inattentive to the nonhuman lives that intersect with their own, and explores the ethical ambiguities that arise when they are.

Dr Svenja Kratz

Art.

• Elle Leane

English. I work at the border of English and Antarctic studies, and often bring Animal Studies into this mix. I have written, among other things, about the politics of penguin films, huskies in Antarctic cinema, the consumption of dogs during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, the charisma of krill, and animals in travel writing. I am a co-editor of the collection Considering Animals (Ashgate 2011), and have published articles in Anthrozoos and Australian Humanities Review, and book chapters in Cinematic Canines, Screening Nature, and Engaging with Animals, with another forthcoming in the Ashgate Research Companion to Travel Writing. Currently, I am working with Hanne Nielsen on an analysis of the cultural significance of three cows taken to Antarctica by Richard Byrd, and on the Macquarie Island penguin-harvesting controversy.

• Dr Dominic Lennard

Hanne Nielsen

Humanities.

• Dr Kaz Ross

Asian Studies. Kaz is a China expert and an Asian Studies scholar with a range of interests centred around affect, politics, and history. Since 2015 she has been the co-creator at Hobart’s Winter festival Dark MOFO of the ogoh-ogoh project, a Balinese inspired ritual involving a communal expression of fear, longing, regret, and sorrow through the making, processing, and burning of a large papier-mâché animal effigy. By choosing an endangered or extinct Tasmanian animal as the creature to be burned, the ogoh-ogoh project explicitly connects the fragile and local natural world with the fear-inducing and overwhelming global ‘premise/promise’ of the Anthropocene – climate change and species extinction. Through both research and practice, Kaz’s work explores the importance of localised rituals for effective engagement with the affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.

Assoc Prof Katrina Schlunke

Humanities.

John Simons

History. Prof John Simons is a freelance writer and consultant who lives in Hobart. He spent most of his career in universities in England and Australia and most recently was Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University. He has written or edited some 20 academic books and numerous articles on topics ranging from medieval romance through Andy Warhol to the history of cricket and for the past 20 years he has specialised in the history of human-animal relations and, especially, the display of exotic animals in Victorian England. He is currently writing 'Obaysch' a biography of a hippo that lived in London Zoo in the mid nineteenth century. He is a published poet and his cantata Bestiale has been performed twice at Arts festivals in the U.K. He has recently finished his first novel which is called 'The Penguin Digester'. He also makes ice cream, pickles and jams and is developing an interest (but not much skill at this point) in Japanese Saori weaving. Main animal studies publications include: Animal Rights and the Politics of Representation (Palgrave, 2002), Rossetti's Wombat (Middlesex UP, 2008), The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy (Libri, 2013), Kangaroo (Reaktion, 2103), Obaysch: a Hippopotamus in Victorian London (forthcoming, Sydney U P). John has numerous articles and book chapters on speciesism, swans in medieval England, medieval pet keeping, the history and politics of vegetarianism, talking animals, the exotic animal trade as an aspect of colonial competition between Britain and Germany, lions in the French Revolution, animals and soft power. In progress is an article on the Victorian craze for seashell collecting.

• Hannah Stark

English. Dr Hannah Stark takes an intersectional approach to animal studies and is particularly interested in the representation of extinction in the Anthropocene. She is currently working on a project with Penny Edmonds and Katrina Schlunke called “Extinction Afterlives and the Global Thylacine Trade: Specular Commerce and Emotions in the Era of Species Mass-Extinction”.

• Yvette Watt
  Group Leader

Art. Dr Yvette Watt is a Lecturer and Studio Coordinator of Painting at the Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania. She is Lead Researcher of the College of Arts and Law Animal Studies Theme Area (ASTA) and Co-Director of MERG. Watt was a founding member of the Australasian Animal Studies Association and is a current committee member of Minding Animals International, and Minding Animals Australia. Watt’s art practice spans 30 years and includes numerous solo and group exhibitions. She has been actively involved in animal advocacy since the mid 1980s, and her artwork is heavily informed by her activism. She is a founder of Animal Rights Advocates (WA) and Animals Tasmania, and was a long term member of the Animals Australia executive. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections in Australia including Parliament House, Canberra, Artbank and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Watt is a co-editor of and contributor to Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations (Ashgate, 2011). Other publications include ‘Down on the Farm: Why do Artists Avoid Farm Animals as Subject Matter?”, in Meat Cultures, Annie Potts (ed), Brill (2016), ‘Animal Factories: Exposing Sites of Capture’, in Captured: Animals Within Culture, Melissa Boyd, ed, (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) and ‘Artists, Animals and Ethics’, in Antennae: the journal of nature in culture, (issue 19, Winter 2011). Watt was commissioned to contribute an entry on ‘Animals Art and Ethics’ for the Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, (Marc Bekoff ed., Greenwood Press, 2010).

• Rob White

Criminology. Criminology and related justice studies examine a variety of issues pertaining to animals through various theoretical lens. Prof Rob White's work covers threats and risks to animals (including animal abuse, destruction of habitat, and the illegal wildlife trade), conceptions of justice (including environmental, ecological and species), and ecocentrism in practice (issues include determining harm and the severity of that harm to non-human entities and establishing who is best to 'speak for' and 'speak about' these voiceless entities).