My animal related research focuses in particular on public manifestations of speciesism. I have written on the historical relationship between speciesism and racism in the United States from the end of Reconstruction to the present using a biopolitical frame. One of my current writing projects examinines agricultural subsidies and federal legislative actions that created the country’s current factory farming regime. I have also published recent work on the relationship between animal representation and international manifestations of Covid-19 and animal representation and the summer 2020 racial uprisings in the United States, and I am engaged in a book project that examines the historical species rhetoric of abortion opponents. I have also written a series of articles concerning the representation of animals in art, literature, and film. From the slaughterhouse photographs of French surrealist Eli Lotar to the pig paintings of Belgian Felicien Rops, from the fiction of American Stanley Elkin to the Italian giallo films of Dario Argento, I have been involved in a sustained examination of the animal presence in a variety of media. I have also written on the literature of therianthropy and on the historical role of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, a 1960s satire movement.
