People

Current ShARCs

Co-director of ShARC

Email: a.cochrane@sheffield.ac.uk

Sheffield University staff page
Wikipedia page

Alasdair Cochrane is Professor of 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

Alasdair has written several books on the issue of ‘animal politics’, including most recently (edited with Mara-Daria Cojocaru): Solidarity with Animals: Promises, Potential and Pitfalls (Oxford University Press, 2024).

His current work focuses on two areas: the democratic representation of animals; and the links between animal rights and anti-war pacifism.

Co-director of ShARC

Email: R.McKay@sheffield.ac.uk

Sheffield University staff page

Bob is Professor of Contemporary Literature in the School of English. His research focuses on the representation of animals and the ethics of animal–human relations in literature, film and culture since 1945. He is especially interested in the way novelists, film-makers and others have responded to the use or abuse of other animals as profound aesthetic problems as well as political and ethical ones. With colleagues John Miller (Sheffield) and Susan McHugh (New England), he edits the book series Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, and is Managing Editor (Humanities) for the journal Society and Animals (Brill).  

Former Co-director of ShARC

Email: john.miller@sheffield.ac.uk

Sheffield University staff page

John Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vice-President of ASLE-UKI (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland) and co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. He was co-director of ShARC from its foundation in 2015 until 2023. Having completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2009, John 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. He arrived in Sheffield in 2012.

Research

John’s research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the late Victorian period. His first monograph Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explored the representation of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. His second book is the co authored volume Walrus for the Reaktion Animal series (2014). He has edited a number of anthologies for the British Library Tales of the Weird series. His most recent book is The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library Publishing, 2022).

John is currently completing a monograph on the tensions and intimacies between animal studies and the environmental humanities. He also has work in various stages of progress on the representation of fur in Victorian literature; the literary history of cultured meat; psychedelics and environmental consciousness; and oil and popular music.

Co-director of ShARC

Email: e.h.giraud@sheffield.ac.uk 

Sheffield University staff page

Eva is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media & Society and co-director of ShARC. She has an interdisciplinary background, with an undergraduate degree in English Literature followed by an MA and PhD in Critical Theory. Since 2011, she predominantly worked in Media and Cultural Studies departments before joining the Department of Sociological Studies at Sheffield in 2021. Eva’s research focuses on how activists engage with digital media, particularly in the context of environmental, animal, and anti-racist activism. She also has a broad critical interest 'non-anthropocentric' theoretical work. Eva has brought these themes together in books including the 2019 monograph What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, anthropocentrism and an ethics of exclusion (which explores productive affinities and tensions between theoretical work and activist praxis) and 2024 edited collection Digital Ecologies (with Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, and Henry Anderson-Elliott). Eva has also written about the popularisation of veganism, as with her 2021 book Veganism: Politics, Practice and Theory (Bloomsbury Academic). She is currently an editor of the journal Cultural Politics and associated book series 'a Cultural Politics book' (Duke University Press).

Email: k.ebury@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @Katherine_Ebury

Sheffield University staff page

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. 

Email: f.collignon@sheffield.ac.uk

Fabienne Collignon is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her work is indexed to critical theory, specifically psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and the more-than-human, and examines the politics of subject formation, as well as techno-cultural events and spatiality. Her book The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human (Routledge, 2022) conceptualises the ‘insectile’—phenomena associated with insects such as buzzing, squirming, hatching—as interferences in the production and maintenance of the so-called human subject. It can be accessed here

Email: c.oliver-hobley@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @jolly_ostrich

Christie is an early career researcher specialising in animal studies, and—increasingly—in speculative fiction. His first monograph—The Existential Animal: Subjectivity, Literature and the More or Less Human (Forthcoming with Routledge)—identifies an unexamined account of “subjectivity” in the philosophical movement of existential phenomenology, combining these insights with close analysis of literary and performative works from the past 50 years to show that the subjectivity of others need not be understood as a problem of unreachable “alterity.” It promises to be “one of the strongest books at the intersection of animal studies and continental philosophy” (according to one reviewer). He has several further articles published or under review in the fields of sf and animal studies. Christie completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield (2017-2021), and was a very active member of ShARC, helping deliver multiple events and managing the centre's online and social media presence. Post-PhD, Christie worked for two years in UoS School of English as a Teaching Associate in Contemporary Literature. and is now working on postdoc proposals for next year. 

Research Communications Coordinator for ShARC

Web Content Manager

Email:  igray3@sheffield.ac.uk

After completing an English Literature BA at the University of East Anglia in 2019 and an English Literature MA at the University of Sheffield in 2021, Indigo is now a WRoCAH funded PhD student at Sheffield. She is interested in relationships between species and bodies in the literature of the coal-mine.

Research

Indigo's thesis, Bodies of coal: Relationships of class and species in industrial literature, 1850-1939, explores the overlaps between human, animal, machine and coal bodies in narratives of coal-mines. She examines the alteration of class, species and colonial relationships by reading material and bodily traces through a series of realist novels.

Email: coneill2@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @b_yondthehuman

Having completed their BA and MA in English Literature in Sheffield, Mo started their PhD in the School of English in April 2018. They first studied late Victorian activist and writer Edward Carpenter as part of a SURE-funded research project during the second year of their undergraduate degree; went on to write about him for their undergraduate dissertation, and now he is the subject of their PhD research.

Research

Entitled ‘Edward Carpenter: Beyond the Human’, Mo's 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 their work foregrounds Carpenter’s animal activism - including his opposition to meat eating, fur wearing, hunting, and vivisection - they also look for ways the more-than-human manifests in his writing more broadly. Mo is especially interested in Carpenter’s esoteric philosophy: influenced by Hinduism, it radically challenges the boundaries of the ‘human.’

Email: g.curto@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @GemmaCurto1
Website: gemmacurto.com

Gemma is a PhD student in English Literature in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Her primary research interests lie in literature and science, chaos and climate change and animal studies in 20th and 21st century literature.

Research

Gemma's project explores notions of chaos in the climate change imaginary. It is widely accepted that global climate is projected to continue to change over this century and beyond. Yet, despite the huge impact on popular consciousness that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Edward Lorenz’s summary of chaos theory had in the 60s and 70s, notions of climate responsibilities in an unjust world arise in the contemporary literary imagination. This project invites the reader to ask the largest possible questions in the midst of environmental catastrophes, which might lead to a benevolent future for Earth but not necessarily for human animals.

In her thesis she addresses the question of whether contemporary fiction authors reflect climate ethics and of the extent to which human and nonhuman animals are valued in this cohabited planet within a biocentric framework. Gemma's research examines works by authors including Tom Stoppard, Mark Z Danielewski, Jonathan Safran Foer, Robert Hunter, Richard McGuire and Margaret Atwood.

Email: fmpayne2@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @FrancesMPayne

After completing her BA in Criminology at the University of Leicester and her MA in International Criminology at the University of Sheffield, Frances is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations here at Sheffield. Her PhD is funded by the Institute for Sustainable Food and she is also part of the research community at the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.

Research

Frances' research investigates how victim conceptualisation and power relations influence how the protection of farmed animals and ‘wild’ animals are prioritised in sustainable food policy. She focuses on the case of Scottish salmon farming, for which policy decisions are increasingly influenced by concern for the conservation of wild salmon while welfare standards for farmed salmon remain limited.

Email: diego.exposito@sheffield.ac.uk
Twitter: @DiegoExposito99
Website: Diego Exposito

Diego is interested in practical ethics and political philosophy broadly understood. However, his main interests lie in the fields of animal ethics, politics, and policy. His thesis deals with our duties towards wild animals who live in human-controlled spaces. In it, he argues that we have negative and positive duties towards these animals, and that this should lead to the change of some of our practices, including the way in which we build cities or how we manage conflicts with these animals      

Email:  liam.healy@sheffield.ac.uk 

Sheffield University staff page

Liam is a designer, researcher and lecturer in the School of Architecture. Convinced by the joyous experiences of being, playing in, and moving through woods and forests, his current research (funded by the AHRC) concerns how the design of paths and trails might contribute to woodland health and expansion, and how more-than-human forest communities engage with these processes. In general his practice-research interests focus around situated speculative design, prototyping, DIY design, care, the Anthropocene, and design's intersection with actor-network theory and science and technology studies.

Email: g.hollin@sheffield.ac.uk 

Sheffield University staff page

Greg Hollin is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, where he works at the intersection of medical sociology and science and technology studies. Greg's research largely concerns the sociology of the psychological and neurological sciences and intersects with ShARC through an interest in the role of laboratory animals and animal modelling. Greg's current project is an ethnographic study of the science of traumatic brain injury-induced neurodegenerative disease.

Email: r.v.duffy@sheffield.ac.uk

Sheffield University staff page

Rosaleen Duffy joined Sheffield University in 2016, following posts at Universities of Edinburgh, Lancaster and SOAS.

Research

Rosaleen is a political ecologist, and her research primarily focuses on the global politics of biodiversity conservation. Most recently her work has focused in on the illegal wildlife trade, and the ways that conservation NGOs, donors and governments attempt to address it. She is author of Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade (Yale University Press, 2022). From 2016-2020 she was PI on the €1.8 million European Research Council Advanced award for the BIOSEC Project (2016-2020) which focused on wildlife crime and security; and the £859,000 ESRC funded Beastly Business Project (2021-2023) on green collar crime and the illegal trade in European wildlife 

Email: maria.borland@sheffield.ac.uk

Maria completed a BA in English Literature at Sheffield in 2004. After several years working as a teacher in the UK and overseas, she returned to Sheffield to complete an MA in 2023. She is currently a WRoCAH funded PhD student.

Research

Maria is interested in the relationship between reading and anthropocentrism/biocentrism in the secondary school dispositif. She is adopting a methodologically hybrid approach to her thesis, combining close reading, theory-based and historicist approaches with post-qualitative research within schools, in order to assess the role played by compulsory Literature education in the formation of adult human-animal relations.

Email: d.j.holroyd@sheffield.ac.uk

Website: David Holroyd

David is a PhD student in political theory at Sheffield, having completed a Research MA in Philosophy and Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a BA in PPE from the University of Oxford. His research interests centre on the normative topics of animal justice, state power, social identity, and the role of academic ideas in public debate, among other themes.

Research: David's current research explores the role that political institutions should play in securing justice for animals. States are often ineffective or simply uninterested in achieving justice, and over-reliance on the coercive authority of laws can degrade the moral agency of citizens. By adopting a less state-centric account, his work highlights the need for animalist political philosophy to encompass economic, social, and personal spheres of the polity too.

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