Dr Alasdair Cochrane
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory
Email: a.cochrane@sheffield.ac.uk
Webpage: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/people/academic/alasdair-cochrane
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Cochrane
Overview
Alasdair Cochrane is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield and co-director of ShARC. The bulk of his research examines the ways in which political institutions, structures and processes can be reimagined to better serve the interests and rights of sentient animals.
Research
I have written three books on these issues: Animal Rights without Liberation (Columbia University Press, 2012), An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018).
My current project, entitled ‘Beastly Cosmopolitanism : A Global Theory of Inter-Species Justice’, explores the nature of our international obligation to animals, and asks what types of institutions might best serve them.
Dr Robert McKay![Bob]()
Senior Lecturer in English Literature
Email: R.McKay@sheffield.ac.uk
Webpage: http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/people/mckay
Overview
Robert McKay is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield and co-director of ShARC. His research focuses on the animal politics of modern and contemporary literature, film and theory, with further interests in contemporary art. He has long been involved in interdisciplinary animal studies, having convened one of the field’s early gatherings, the Millennial Animals conference at Sheffield in 2000.
Research
I am series co-editor for Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature and Assistant Editor (Literature) for Society and Animals. I am currently working on two projects: a study on the place of animal ethics in American culture, politics and law 1930-1960 and a monograph titled Animal Form: The Politics of Species in Contemporary Literature.
Dr John Miller![John]()
Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Email: john.miller@sheffield.ac.uk
Webpage: shef.ac.uk/english/people/miller
Overview
John Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and co-director of ShARC. Having completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2009, John then held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and at the University of Northern British Columbia. He also held a teaching fellowship at the University of East Anglia. John is President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland) and co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.
Research
My research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the late Victorian period. My first monograph Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explores the representation of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. My second book is the co-authored volume Walrus for the Reaktion Animal series. I am currently near to completing a monograph titled Victorians in Furs: Fiction, Fashion and Activism and I have started work on my next project, A Literary History of In Vitro Meat which examines the origins of cultured flesh in the late nineteenth century and traces its development in imaginative literature through to the present. I am also contributing co-editor of The Dictionary of Neoliberal Terms (Spirit Duplicator) and have recently edited a collection of stories about tattooing for the British Library.
Dr Katherine Ebury![]()
Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature
Email: k.ebury@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @Katherine_Ebury
Website: www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/people/academic-staff/dr-katherine-ebury
Overview
Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her first monograph, Modernism and Cosmology, appeared in 2014, and she is the co-editor (with Dr James Alexander Fraser) of Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction, which appeared with Palgrave in 2018. Her articles and chapters have appeared in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual, Journal of Modern Literature, and Society and Animals. She is especially interested in intersections between animal studies and literature and science methodology, as well as the intersection between human and nonhuman rights discourses. She is currently working on an AHRC-funded new book project on modern literature and the death penalty, including a chapter on psychoanalytic and anthropological understandings of the totem animal in relation to sacrifice.
Dr Fabienne Collignon![]()
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature
Email: f.collignon@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @Existenzform
Overview
Fabienne Collignon is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield and is currently working on ‘the insectile’. Her research interests are critical theory, in particular theories of technology, subject formation, the ‘in-human’. She has published articles in Textual Practice, C-Theory, Journal of American Studies, Orbit, Configurations, new formations and Extrapolation.
Dr Seán McCorry![Sean]()
Postdoctoral researcher, English Literature
Email: s.mccorry@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @Sean_McCorry
Webpage: https://usheffield.academia.edu/SeanMcCorry
Overview
I have recently completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield, where I have been researching the material and conceptual relationships between animals and technology in postwar culture. I focus on literary animal studies while also drawing on other approaches, including ecocriticism, science fiction studies, posthumanist theory, extinction studies, and the new materialism(s).
Research
I am hoping to develop my thesis into a research monograph. My thesis investigates the crisis of humanism in postwar culture (1945-1970), tracing how the contemporary acceleration of technological development incited fears concerning the disappearance of human agency, and asking how these fears were articulated through a discourse of species.
Together with my colleague Dr. John Miller, I am preparing an edited collection of essays on the topic of flesh-eating and literature.
Dr Sarah Bezan![]()
Newton International Fellow
Email: s.bezan@sheffield.ac.uk
Webpage: https://www.sarahbezan.com
Overview
Research
Dr Josh Milburn![]()
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Politics and International Relations
Email: jmilburn02@qub.ac.uk
Webpage: josh-milburn.com
Overview
Josh is a moral and political philosopher who writes about animal ethics. Before starting a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Sheffield in 2019, he taught at the University of York and held a the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Animal Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. He is a section editor of the journal Politics and Animals and a member of the Vegan Society’s Research Advisory Committee.
Research
Josh’s current research project is called Food Justice and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully. He is exploring whether a state that respects animal rights could have a non-vegan food system – perhaps by producing in vitro meat, farming invertebrates, or coming up with other creative sources of animal-based foods. Prior and ongoing research has explored the place of animals in liberal and libertarian political theory, human relationships with wild animals, and the ethics of feeding animals.
Ming Panha![]()
PhD student in English Literature
Email: mpanha1@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @MermanNott
Overview
I am granted funding for my PhD study from Thammasat University, Thailand to begin my PhD study in English Literature in 2017. I’m interested in literature written in English from late eighteenth century to early twentieth century.
Research
My PhD thesis focuses on pet dogs in Sherlock Holmes fictions by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the British imperial context. I’m looking at pet dogs as a rebellious yet precarious living flesh, against medievalist and masculinist labelling, which is considered consolation for the loss of British imperial power as well as the revolution in gendered identity politics. In Sherlock Holmes fictions, canine bodies in the domestic space play the role of discursive battlefield, and yet consider itself void of meaning and thus rebellious against human discursive practices.
Christie Oliver-Hobley![]()
PhD student in English Literature
Research Communications and Knowledge Exchange Coordinator for ShARC
Co-Custodian of the ShARC Blog.
Email: cjoliver-hobley1@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @jolly_ostrich
Overview
I am originally from Sheffield, but left six years ago to study BA English Language & Literature at the University of Leeds (graduating 2014). Thence to Cambridge to complete an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary English Studies (completed in 2016). I have now returned to the city of my upbringing to complete a PhD in English Literature, which is funded by the AHRC via the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH).
Research
My PhD research engages with an eclectic array of contemporary sources, including nature memoirs, poetry, short stories, cinema, performance research and performance art. What links all of these diverse ‘texts’ is their interest in nonhuman subjectivities. Adopting animal affects, or inhabiting imagined nonhuman minds, they enact radical decentrings of the human. Some of these humans purportedly seek to surmount the wall of animal/human alterity entirely: to be, or to become, animal. In analysing these primary sources, my research draws heavily upon scientific enquiries into the nature of animal behaviour and/or minds, and upon Continental-Philosophical thinking about animals, over the past eighty-or-so years.
Peter Sands![]()
PhD student in English Literature
Email: pwsands1@sheffield.ac.uk
Overview
After completing a BA in English and History and an MA in English Literature here at Sheffield, I began my PhD in September 2017, funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH). With grounding in literary animal studies, my work draws influence from biopolitical and posthumanist theory, ecocriticism and speculative fiction.
Research
My PhD research examines the role of species in the technological imagination of the Cold War. I am broadly concerned with the ways in which narratives of enclosure, contamination and disaster serve to secure the boundaries of the human both as biopolitical sovereign and as bare — or animal — life. My literary sources include works by Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and Richard Matheson.
Mira Lieberman![]()
PhD student in Management School
Email: mlieberman-boyd1@sheffield.ac.
Blog: https://sociolinguini.wordpres
Overview
Having completed by BA in Modern Languages with the Open University, and my MA in Sociocultural linguistics at Goldsmiths, University of London, I am now looking to apply linguistic analysis in my PhD research.
Research
Charlotte O’Neill![]()
PhD student in English Literature (Part-time)
Email: coneill2@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @b_yondthehuman
Overview
Having completed my BA and MA in English Literature in Sheffield, I started my PhD in the School of English in April 2018. I first studied late Victorian activist and writer Edward Carpenter as part of a SURE-funded research project during the second year of my undergraduate degree; I went on to write about him for my undergraduate dissertation, and now he is the subject of my PhD research.
Research
Entitled ‘Edward Carpenter: Beyond the Human’, my thesis looks for the presence of the non-human in Carpenter’s prolific writing, uncovering an underexplored interest of the notable socialist and LGBT+ rights campaigner. While my work foregrounds Carpenter’s animal activism – including his opposition to meat eating, fur wearing, hunting, and vivisection – I also look for ways the more-than-human manifests in his writing more broadly. I am especially interested in Carpenter’s esoteric philosophy: influenced by Hinduism, it radically challenges the boundaries of the ‘human.’
Daniel J Bowman ![]()
PhD student in English Literature
Research Communications and Knowledge Exchange Coordinator for ShARC
Custodian of the ShARC Blog.
Email: djbowman1@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @DanielJBowman1
Overview
Research
Samantha J Hind![]()
PhD Student in English Literature
Email: sjhind@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @samjhind
Overview
After completing an English and Film BA at the University of Salford in 2018 and an English Literature MA at the University of Sheffield in 2019, I am now a WRoCAH funded PhD student at Sheffield. I am interested in representations of flesh, both human animal and non-human animal, in post-1990s speculative fiction.
Research
One question reoccurs, when people find out someone chooses not to consume flesh: what would you eat, if you were on a desert island and all there was to eat was a pig? Consider, then, how desolate landscapes and time limiting scenarios have the potential to alter our perceptions of which kinds of flesh are socially acceptable to eat and how a rhetoric surrounding flesh’s essentialism can be dispelled.
My thesis will aim to examine a variety of speculative fiction texts, ranging from the industrialised farming of human animals in Joseph D’Lacey’s novel, Meat, to “the future is vegan” narrative of Simon Amstell’s TV film, Carnage. The speculative texts I plan to examine facilitate situations where humanity’s use of earth’s resources and our understanding of what it means to be considered flesh are questioned, providing a much needed understanding of what it means to be and eat flesh in a world desperate for a sustainable alternative.
Alice Higgs![elephant]()
PhD student in English Literature
Email: ahiggs1@sheffield.ac.uk
Overview
I am a first-year PhD candidate in the department of English Literature, having completed both my BA and MA here at Sheffield. My work focuses on the contemporary representation of animals in literature, drawing on critical animal studies, postcolonial theory and anthropology.
Research
My PhD thesis examines the representation of animals in contemporary Canadian literature, specifically post 1960. I am interested in looking at the ways in which Canadian literature interacts with animal representation, settler-colonialism and the vast cultural identities that make up Canada. The spread of my research extends to authors including Margaret Atwood and Marian Engel, but also the work of Canadian-immigrant authors, such as Rawi Hage and Yann Martel, and First Nation authors, such as Tracey Lindberg and Eden Robinson.
Funded by the Canada-UK Foundation
Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London
http://www.canadaukfoundation.org/
Joe Mansfield
PhD student in English Literature
Email: ega08jtm@sheffield.ac.uk
Overview
I am currently in my third year of study for a PhD in English Literature, having previously completed both my BA and MA qualifications here at Sheffield. My work focuses on comparisons between representations of animal life in contemporary fiction and scientific models of knowledge, particularly the fields of primatology and cognitive ethology.
Research
My thesis focuses on comparing contemporary literary fiction and scientific approaches to animal cognition (particularly in primates) and how these different models of knowledge are constructed and reconstructed into the wider framework of animal ethics. My scientific resources range between the likes of Jane Goodall, Roger Fouts and Marc Bekoff. My literary sources comprise mostly of post-1960s American and Canadian fiction including the works of Karen Joy Fowler, William Boyd and Colin McAdam.
Diana De Ritter![]()
PhD student in English Literature
Email: dnwebber1@sheffield.ac.uk
Overview
Funded by the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, I am a PhD candidate in the School of English at Sheffield. My area of research broadly covers literary representations of animals from 1800 to the present, with a particular interest in the Victorian period and depictions of farm/companion animals. After earning my MA at the University of Leeds in 2011, I served as Lecturer in English Literature and Language at Utah Valley University in the United States, teaching rhetoric and academic writing.
Review
My PhD thesis examines meat consumption and animal resources in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. Currently, I am investigating portrayals of animals (especially pigs) in the comedic writings of P.G. Wodehouse and Saki. I am interested in how various literary modes imagine alternative roles for animals beyond their limited function as food commodities. My interest in critical animal studies originated during my MA, with a dissertation that tracked evolving trends in characterising the dog throughout nineteenth-century British literature.
Rebecca Simon![]()
PhD student in English Literature
Email: rwosimon1@sheffield.ac.uk
Overview
I began my PhD in the University of Sheffield’s English department in January 2015. My primary fields of research are critical animal studies and Laruellean non-philosophy, with groundings in biopolitics and speculative realism. I examine the ways in which standard philosophy excises a generic creatural thought from itself and from critical thought in general through a supposed self-sufficiency of method – an identity that is immanent to thought and produced by a set of internal decisions that subdivide and reify the Real.
Research
My thesis examines non-philosophy’s capacity for understanding animal life without casting in the image of philosophy’s auto-specular All, or its philomorphising of the Real and of thought. It aims to think through a generic matrix the elements of creatural meta-language, using this as basis for theorising without subjecting thought to standard philosophy’s formal disidentification from the nonhuman. This involves an attempt at thinking an “animal-without-animality,” since, I argue, animality is already a mode of being captured by metaphysics and weaponised against real animals.
I’m also currently investigating science-fiction’s capacity to undermine metaphysical authoritarianism (and therefore, its capacity to provide a thought of the generic creatural).