Taking Animals Apart Participant Biographies
Birgit Bach has always been inspired by science and nature. She studied Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin and received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 1996 while studying at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. Before beginning graduate school, she spent many months in Mozambique, Africa where she was inspired by the colors and patterns of the African art that she saw there. That influence, as well as her interest in the natural world and animals, is seen in much of her art. She has annual shows of her artwork in the Madison area and currently lives in Madison ,WI with her husband and two children.
James Baerwolf co-owns Sassy Cow Farms with his brother Robert. They are the third generation to farm land purchased by their grandfather in 1946. James graduated from UW-Madison and began dairying immediately after college. Sassy Cow Farms has two distinct herds, 400 traditional cows and 100 organic cows, living a mile apart and supplies milk products, cheese curds, and ice cream to retailers and restaurants in southern Wisconsin and Chicago.
Kata Beilin specializes in narrative, film and culture of contemporary Spain. She is an author of three books: Conversaciones literarias con novelistas contemporáneos (Literary Conversations with Contemporary Novelists, Tamesis, 2004), Meteory (Metheors, a novel, Agawa 2005), and Del infierno al cuerpo: otredad en la narrativa y cine peninsular contemporáneo (From Hell to Flesh: Otherness in Spanish Contemporary Narrative and Film, Libertarias, 2007). This last book focuses on otherness in Spanish contemporary literature and film and its meanings in ethics and epistemology of the last two centuries. Thus it connects to the current project, where the other takes the form of a non-human animal. Katarzyna is also finishing her second novel, Aquarius, which inquires about the multiple meanings and forms of the end of the world.
Peter Boger is a Ph.D. candidate in environment and resources at UW-Madison focused on the relationship between animals on film and animals in the wild. He is the programmer for the Tales from Planet Earth environmental film festival and has guest-curated films for the Wisconsin Film Festival and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. He has worked as a communications special assistant in New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection and historical interpreter for the U.S. Forest Service. He earned a B.A. in History from Princeton University focused on zoo history and an M.S. from UW-Madison focused on cross-cultural environmental education. He has worked with chimpanzees fluent in sign language and with captive tigers.
Helen Bullard is a UK-based artist whose practice is research-based and considers human and other animal relationships, as well as thresholds of contact. She works collaboratively with individuals and institutions, as well as independently, with subjects such as “natural” history, psychology, and synthetic biology. She has been funded to research and make work in Bulgaria, Sweden, the US, and through the UK including the Orkney Islands, and The Fens. She is also a member of the advisory board for Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and an Artistic Research Associate in the Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University, UK.
Rachel Carr is starting her third year of a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia, with a thesis topic focusing on xenotransplantation (animal to human transplantation). In particular she is interested in pig-human relationships in biomedicine, agriculture and urbanisation and the way that pigs, non-human primates, and humans get remade in these multispecies interactions, especially in relation to fields of health and infectious disease.
Rob Chiles is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Sociology and Community & Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison. Over the past year, he served as a fellow in the graduate school's Integrating Research, Ethics, and Scholarship (IRES) program. His dissertation research examines the
legitimation and contestation of meat production/consumption as socially and environmentally sustainable.
Rosemary-Claire Collard is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. She studies animals (especially wildlife) in relation to political economies (particularly bio-economies and biocapital), science, ethics, and biopower. Her dissertation, “Animal traffic: life, power and capital in global live wildlife trade,” asks how wild animals’ bodies and lives are transformed into commodities – “undead things” to borrow Haraway’s language – that circulate worldwide and can be bought, sold, and owned.
James Crews is the author of The Book of What Stays, a collection of poetry published by the University of Nebraska Press. In his free time, James writes for basalt magazine and regularly contributes to the (London) Times Literary Supplement. He has worked as a salesman of bespoke wallpaper, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, and an English teacher in rural Oregon. He is now living and teaching in Lincoln, Nebraska where he’s working on a Ph.D.
Amritava Das is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned his M.Eng. with First Class Honours in Chemical Engineering with Industrial Experience from the University of Manchester in the UK. He has worked as an industrial placement engineer for GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare R&D. He is also a member of the UW Hoofers sailing club and plays the sitar, an Indian classical stringed instrument. He is trained in North Indian Classical Music and Hindustani music.
Garin Fons is a partner in the Underground Food Collective, a Madison-based group of cooks and entrepreneurs, committed to teaching and sharing a better way for food to be prepared and enjoyed. The group offers catering services, is soon opening a restaurant called Forequarter, and also has a fresh and cured meats Community Supported Agriculture style (CSA) program.
Sarah Groeneveld is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she is currently working on her dissertation, titled “‘The Story with Animals is the Better Story’: Animals in Contemporary Transnational Literature.” Her research looks into how a growing awareness of a multispecies world is changing the ways in which relationships between humans and animals are conceptualized and represented in literature from around the world.
Peter Hobbins trained initially in literature and pharmacology - focusing his research on snake venoms - before working as a medical writer. Returning to study, he pursued his lifelong passion for history via a Master of Medical Humanities degree. As a historian of science and medicine, Peter's publications to date have largely centered on the structures and projects of twentieth-century Australian medical research. Currently undertaking a Ph.D. at Sydney University, his project explores the dynamics between lay, medical, and scientific knowledges in constructing the identities of venomous animals in nineteenth-century Australasia.
Linda F. Hogle, Ph.D. is an anthropologist of science, technology and medicine and Professor in the Department of Medical History & Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on socio-cultural, organizational, and legal-regulatory issues in emerging biomedical engineering technologies, in particular, regenerative medicine. She additionally teaches courses on interactions between the body and technologies, including so-called ‘enhancement’ technologies, An edited volume on emerging policy and ethical issues in stem cell research is forthcoming (Springer Press) and she is currently writing a book manuscript based on her ethnography of tissue engineering and stem cell research.
Nathan Jandl is a doctoral student in Literary Studies at UW-Madison. He grew up in Western Massachusetts and completed his B.A. in English at Middlebury College in Vermont. His academic interests include 20th century American literature, especially poetry; ecocriticism and literary theory; affect and bodily experience; land art and photography; and cultural geography.
Steph Januchowski-Hartley is originally from Michigan, USA. She has spent the last 4 years conducting research in Australia. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Limnology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is currently working with Dr Peter McIntyre (Center for Limnology), Dr Matt Diebel (Wisconsin DNR) and Dr Patrick Doran (The Nature Conservancy Great Lakes) to identify priority areas for barrier removal (culverts/dams) to restore connectivity between the Great Lakes and their tributaries. For her PhD she used systematic conservation planning methods to identify conservation priorities for freshwater ecosystems and dependent species. Most of her work involves freshwater fish and invasive species management. She is particularly interested in questions related to connectivity; fish ecology; ecology and management of invasive species; optimal resource allocation for catchment based conservation; and off-reserve conservation on private and public lands. See http://livingfreshwaters.wordpress.com/
Patrick Johnson graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in English Literature with an emphasis in creative writing and a certificate in material culture, with research interests in animal studies, critical theory, Wisconsin burial mound culture, contemporary poetry, and contemporary art. Next year he will pursue an M.F.A. in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Daniel Kleinman is a Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison. He is the current director of the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, which seeks to collaborate across the boundaries of the modern research university to promote the understanding of science, technology and medicine as human enterprises. His research interests broadly include the commercialization of the university and the organization of the knowledge economy, democracy and expertise, and agricultural biotechnology policy.
Maria Lux is a May 2012 graduate of the M.F.A. program in studio art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her B.F.As in studio art (painting and drawing) and graphic design from Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa in 2006. Between her undergraduate and graduate school experiences, she worked as a graphic designer for an online masters program in agronomy (agriculture/crop science/soil science etc.). She makes artwork that centers around animals, and in particular places where animals intersect with scientific, historical, or cultural-studies disciplines. The piece she is exhibiting and contributing to the conference discussion is an installation entitled Pig Organ.
Jen Martin is a Ph.D. candidate in History at UW-Madison. Her dissertation, “The Slicing Fin: The Transformation of Sharks from Killing Machines to Endangered Species in American Cultures,” traces a complex shift in American perceptions of these animals from lethal predators to symbols of fragile nature. Her research interests include environmental history, history of science, and animal studies.
Nancy Mathews is the director of UW-Madison’s Morgridge Center for Public Service and a professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Nancy’s past administrative leadership includes directing the 2009 reaccreditation for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, chairing the Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development program at the Nelson Institute, serving as a Peer Reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission, and serving on Biological Divisional tenure committee. For the past 15 years Nancy has taught interdisciplinary capstone courses on the conservation of endangered species. Her research has focused primarily on wildlife ecology and, in particular, white-tailed deer behavior and their role in spreading chronic wasting disease. She and her graduate students also focus on community-based conservation. Nancy was a recent fellow in the CIC Academic Leadership Program and currently serves on the board of directors for the International Crane Foundation.
Gregg Mitman is the William Coleman Professor of History of Science and Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests span the history of ecology, nature, and health in twentieth-century America across scientific and popular culture. He is the author of The State of Nature: Ecology and American Social Thought, 1900-1950 (1992), Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film (1999), and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (2007). He has written extensively on nature and film, and served as the interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies from 2008 to 2012.
Laura Halverson Monahan is the curator of collections at the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum. She teaches courses in Museum Studies at UW-Madison and has a master's degree in archaeology.
Tamar Novick is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate at the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Tamar holds a dual BA in Cognitive Science and in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in the history and anthropology of health and the body, environmental history, and their intersections with nationalism and colonialism. She is also interested in the bidirectional relations between humans and animals in the production of scientific knowledge. Her dissertation project is currently titled "Milk & Honey: The Technomystical Creation of a Holy Land, 1900-1960." In this project, she examines how people used science and technology to recreate the “land flowing with milk and honey” in Palestine/Israel.
Sarah O’Brien is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. She received an honours B.A. in English and Spanish from the University of Florida in 2005 and a Masters degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto in 2007. Her dissertation, “Unnerving Images: Cinematic Representations of Animal Slaughter and the Ethics of Shock,” examines the formal aesthetics and representational ethics at work in a range of films that document animal slaughter (from Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike to Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to animal-rights videos). Her broader research interests include death in contemporary visual culture, phenomenological readings of film spectatorship, and the intersections of formalism and deconstruction. In 2010–11, she was a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.
Christopher Pax is the “chef liaison” and sales point person for Black Earth Meats, a Wisconsin-based organic- and humane handling-certified meat-processing company that sells cuts of meat to restaurants and retailers in the Upper Midwest. Christopher has twenty years of experience in restaurants and opened The Old Fashioned, one of the more popular restaurants in Madison. He has friends and contacts throughout the Madison and Chicago restaurant world and literally speaks the language of the chefs.
Bryce Renninger is a Ph.D. student in the Media Studies program at Rutgers Univeristy who primarily teaches courses that explore (digital) media technologies through history, production, and theory. He also writes extensively about independent and world cinema, serving as a contributing writer for the film website indieWIRE. He is also the Director of Programming for Newfest: New York's LGBT Film Festival. He is currently working on his dissertation, Single Together: Resisting Marriage-as-Ideal in the Information Age, which explores various ways media is manipulated, produced, and consumed in ways that de-emphasize or question the dominance of marriage as a cultural and legal institution.
Eric Schatzberg is an associate professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing on the history of technology, technology and culture, and science and technology in the postwar era. He is the incoming director of the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.
Susan Squier received her education at Princeton University and Stanford University. She is Brill Professor of Women's Studies, English and STS (Science, Technology and Society) at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research Interests include: cultural studies of science and medicine; feminist theory; modernism; and comics and medicine.
Major Publications: Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (1985); Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994); Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (1984); Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (1989); Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (1999); Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (Duke University Press, 2003), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Duke University Press, 2004) and Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2011) which won the Michelle Kendrick Prize of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. With Dr. Ian Williams (UK) she co-edits the Penn State University Press book series, Graphic Medicine, which publishes scholarly studies of comics, as well as comics themselves, that enact and explore the experiences of health care, medicine, illness, and disability.
She was scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center (February-March 2001), Visiting Distinguished Fellow, LaTrobe University, Melbourne Australia (1992) and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Melbourne, Australia (1990-1991). She is Editorial Board member of the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Executive Board member and past President of the Society for Literature and Science. In Summer 2002, she co-directed (with Anne Hunsaker Hawkins) the NEH Summer Institute, "Medicine, Literature, and Culture," held at the Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey Medical Center. She is on the Editorial Board of the Penn State University Press, and the Selection Jury of the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize in 2011-2012, and she serves on the advisory board of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, The University of Western Australia, Perth.
Sai Suryan obtained his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his doctoral work with paper wasps, Sai found that nest vibrations performed by socially dominant wasps pre-dispose brood to develop into workers. The kinds of experiments that Sai's doctoral research entailed led him to question how the biosciences institute particular relationships with experimented-upon lives (be they human or non-human), and spurred his eventual entry into the social and historical studies of science. Sai is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Commmunity & Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In collaboration with Professor Daniel Kleinman, Sai studies the social and historical dimensions of Colony Collapse Disorder-- an ongoing phenomenon of mass die-offs of honey bees in the United States and elsewhere. His work examining the politics of knowledge regarding vanishing bees has appeared in the National Academy of Science's Issues in Science & Technology, and is forthcoming in Science, Technology, and Human Values.
Heather Swan is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research examines the human relationship with honeybees through time. She received an M.F.A. in poetry from the UW in 2007 and wanted to further investigate the ways in which art and literature are responding to issues of environmental destruction, exile, and extinction. Last spring an exhibit of her artwork called "Loss, Longing, and Belonging: Inhabiting the Human Body in an Endangered World" was hosted by CHE (Center for Culture, History, and Environment). Her poetry has appeared in The Cream City Review, Iris, Wisconsin People and Ideas, The Comstock Review, and others. Her short collection, The Edge of Damage won first prize from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets in 2009. She is also a beekeeper.
Birgit Bach has always been inspired by science and nature. She studied Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin and received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 1996 while studying at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine. Before beginning graduate school, she spent many months in Mozambique, Africa where she was inspired by the colors and patterns of the African art that she saw there. That influence, as well as her interest in the natural world and animals, is seen in much of her art. She has annual shows of her artwork in the Madison area and currently lives in Madison ,WI with her husband and two children.
James Baerwolf co-owns Sassy Cow Farms with his brother Robert. They are the third generation to farm land purchased by their grandfather in 1946. James graduated from UW-Madison and began dairying immediately after college. Sassy Cow Farms has two distinct herds, 400 traditional cows and 100 organic cows, living a mile apart and supplies milk products, cheese curds, and ice cream to retailers and restaurants in southern Wisconsin and Chicago.
Kata Beilin specializes in narrative, film and culture of contemporary Spain. She is an author of three books: Conversaciones literarias con novelistas contemporáneos (Literary Conversations with Contemporary Novelists, Tamesis, 2004), Meteory (Metheors, a novel, Agawa 2005), and Del infierno al cuerpo: otredad en la narrativa y cine peninsular contemporáneo (From Hell to Flesh: Otherness in Spanish Contemporary Narrative and Film, Libertarias, 2007). This last book focuses on otherness in Spanish contemporary literature and film and its meanings in ethics and epistemology of the last two centuries. Thus it connects to the current project, where the other takes the form of a non-human animal. Katarzyna is also finishing her second novel, Aquarius, which inquires about the multiple meanings and forms of the end of the world.
Peter Boger is a Ph.D. candidate in environment and resources at UW-Madison focused on the relationship between animals on film and animals in the wild. He is the programmer for the Tales from Planet Earth environmental film festival and has guest-curated films for the Wisconsin Film Festival and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. He has worked as a communications special assistant in New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection and historical interpreter for the U.S. Forest Service. He earned a B.A. in History from Princeton University focused on zoo history and an M.S. from UW-Madison focused on cross-cultural environmental education. He has worked with chimpanzees fluent in sign language and with captive tigers.
Helen Bullard is a UK-based artist whose practice is research-based and considers human and other animal relationships, as well as thresholds of contact. She works collaboratively with individuals and institutions, as well as independently, with subjects such as “natural” history, psychology, and synthetic biology. She has been funded to research and make work in Bulgaria, Sweden, the US, and through the UK including the Orkney Islands, and The Fens. She is also a member of the advisory board for Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and an Artistic Research Associate in the Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University, UK.
Rachel Carr is starting her third year of a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia, with a thesis topic focusing on xenotransplantation (animal to human transplantation). In particular she is interested in pig-human relationships in biomedicine, agriculture and urbanisation and the way that pigs, non-human primates, and humans get remade in these multispecies interactions, especially in relation to fields of health and infectious disease.
Rob Chiles is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Sociology and Community & Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison. Over the past year, he served as a fellow in the graduate school's Integrating Research, Ethics, and Scholarship (IRES) program. His dissertation research examines the
legitimation and contestation of meat production/consumption as socially and environmentally sustainable.
Rosemary-Claire Collard is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver. She studies animals (especially wildlife) in relation to political economies (particularly bio-economies and biocapital), science, ethics, and biopower. Her dissertation, “Animal traffic: life, power and capital in global live wildlife trade,” asks how wild animals’ bodies and lives are transformed into commodities – “undead things” to borrow Haraway’s language – that circulate worldwide and can be bought, sold, and owned.
James Crews is the author of The Book of What Stays, a collection of poetry published by the University of Nebraska Press. In his free time, James writes for basalt magazine and regularly contributes to the (London) Times Literary Supplement. He has worked as a salesman of bespoke wallpaper, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, and an English teacher in rural Oregon. He is now living and teaching in Lincoln, Nebraska where he’s working on a Ph.D.
Amritava Das is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned his M.Eng. with First Class Honours in Chemical Engineering with Industrial Experience from the University of Manchester in the UK. He has worked as an industrial placement engineer for GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare R&D. He is also a member of the UW Hoofers sailing club and plays the sitar, an Indian classical stringed instrument. He is trained in North Indian Classical Music and Hindustani music.
Garin Fons is a partner in the Underground Food Collective, a Madison-based group of cooks and entrepreneurs, committed to teaching and sharing a better way for food to be prepared and enjoyed. The group offers catering services, is soon opening a restaurant called Forequarter, and also has a fresh and cured meats Community Supported Agriculture style (CSA) program.
Sarah Groeneveld is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she is currently working on her dissertation, titled “‘The Story with Animals is the Better Story’: Animals in Contemporary Transnational Literature.” Her research looks into how a growing awareness of a multispecies world is changing the ways in which relationships between humans and animals are conceptualized and represented in literature from around the world.
Peter Hobbins trained initially in literature and pharmacology - focusing his research on snake venoms - before working as a medical writer. Returning to study, he pursued his lifelong passion for history via a Master of Medical Humanities degree. As a historian of science and medicine, Peter's publications to date have largely centered on the structures and projects of twentieth-century Australian medical research. Currently undertaking a Ph.D. at Sydney University, his project explores the dynamics between lay, medical, and scientific knowledges in constructing the identities of venomous animals in nineteenth-century Australasia.
Linda F. Hogle, Ph.D. is an anthropologist of science, technology and medicine and Professor in the Department of Medical History & Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on socio-cultural, organizational, and legal-regulatory issues in emerging biomedical engineering technologies, in particular, regenerative medicine. She additionally teaches courses on interactions between the body and technologies, including so-called ‘enhancement’ technologies, An edited volume on emerging policy and ethical issues in stem cell research is forthcoming (Springer Press) and she is currently writing a book manuscript based on her ethnography of tissue engineering and stem cell research.
Nathan Jandl is a doctoral student in Literary Studies at UW-Madison. He grew up in Western Massachusetts and completed his B.A. in English at Middlebury College in Vermont. His academic interests include 20th century American literature, especially poetry; ecocriticism and literary theory; affect and bodily experience; land art and photography; and cultural geography.
Steph Januchowski-Hartley is originally from Michigan, USA. She has spent the last 4 years conducting research in Australia. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Limnology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is currently working with Dr Peter McIntyre (Center for Limnology), Dr Matt Diebel (Wisconsin DNR) and Dr Patrick Doran (The Nature Conservancy Great Lakes) to identify priority areas for barrier removal (culverts/dams) to restore connectivity between the Great Lakes and their tributaries. For her PhD she used systematic conservation planning methods to identify conservation priorities for freshwater ecosystems and dependent species. Most of her work involves freshwater fish and invasive species management. She is particularly interested in questions related to connectivity; fish ecology; ecology and management of invasive species; optimal resource allocation for catchment based conservation; and off-reserve conservation on private and public lands. See http://livingfreshwaters.wordpress.com/
Patrick Johnson graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in English Literature with an emphasis in creative writing and a certificate in material culture, with research interests in animal studies, critical theory, Wisconsin burial mound culture, contemporary poetry, and contemporary art. Next year he will pursue an M.F.A. in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Daniel Kleinman is a Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison. He is the current director of the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, which seeks to collaborate across the boundaries of the modern research university to promote the understanding of science, technology and medicine as human enterprises. His research interests broadly include the commercialization of the university and the organization of the knowledge economy, democracy and expertise, and agricultural biotechnology policy.
Maria Lux is a May 2012 graduate of the M.F.A. program in studio art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her B.F.As in studio art (painting and drawing) and graphic design from Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa in 2006. Between her undergraduate and graduate school experiences, she worked as a graphic designer for an online masters program in agronomy (agriculture/crop science/soil science etc.). She makes artwork that centers around animals, and in particular places where animals intersect with scientific, historical, or cultural-studies disciplines. The piece she is exhibiting and contributing to the conference discussion is an installation entitled Pig Organ.
Jen Martin is a Ph.D. candidate in History at UW-Madison. Her dissertation, “The Slicing Fin: The Transformation of Sharks from Killing Machines to Endangered Species in American Cultures,” traces a complex shift in American perceptions of these animals from lethal predators to symbols of fragile nature. Her research interests include environmental history, history of science, and animal studies.
Nancy Mathews is the director of UW-Madison’s Morgridge Center for Public Service and a professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Nancy’s past administrative leadership includes directing the 2009 reaccreditation for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, chairing the Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development program at the Nelson Institute, serving as a Peer Reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission, and serving on Biological Divisional tenure committee. For the past 15 years Nancy has taught interdisciplinary capstone courses on the conservation of endangered species. Her research has focused primarily on wildlife ecology and, in particular, white-tailed deer behavior and their role in spreading chronic wasting disease. She and her graduate students also focus on community-based conservation. Nancy was a recent fellow in the CIC Academic Leadership Program and currently serves on the board of directors for the International Crane Foundation.
Gregg Mitman is the William Coleman Professor of History of Science and Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests span the history of ecology, nature, and health in twentieth-century America across scientific and popular culture. He is the author of The State of Nature: Ecology and American Social Thought, 1900-1950 (1992), Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film (1999), and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (2007). He has written extensively on nature and film, and served as the interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies from 2008 to 2012.
Laura Halverson Monahan is the curator of collections at the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum. She teaches courses in Museum Studies at UW-Madison and has a master's degree in archaeology.
Tamar Novick is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate at the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Tamar holds a dual BA in Cognitive Science and in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in the history and anthropology of health and the body, environmental history, and their intersections with nationalism and colonialism. She is also interested in the bidirectional relations between humans and animals in the production of scientific knowledge. Her dissertation project is currently titled "Milk & Honey: The Technomystical Creation of a Holy Land, 1900-1960." In this project, she examines how people used science and technology to recreate the “land flowing with milk and honey” in Palestine/Israel.
Sarah O’Brien is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. She received an honours B.A. in English and Spanish from the University of Florida in 2005 and a Masters degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto in 2007. Her dissertation, “Unnerving Images: Cinematic Representations of Animal Slaughter and the Ethics of Shock,” examines the formal aesthetics and representational ethics at work in a range of films that document animal slaughter (from Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike to Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to animal-rights videos). Her broader research interests include death in contemporary visual culture, phenomenological readings of film spectatorship, and the intersections of formalism and deconstruction. In 2010–11, she was a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.
Christopher Pax is the “chef liaison” and sales point person for Black Earth Meats, a Wisconsin-based organic- and humane handling-certified meat-processing company that sells cuts of meat to restaurants and retailers in the Upper Midwest. Christopher has twenty years of experience in restaurants and opened The Old Fashioned, one of the more popular restaurants in Madison. He has friends and contacts throughout the Madison and Chicago restaurant world and literally speaks the language of the chefs.
Bryce Renninger is a Ph.D. student in the Media Studies program at Rutgers Univeristy who primarily teaches courses that explore (digital) media technologies through history, production, and theory. He also writes extensively about independent and world cinema, serving as a contributing writer for the film website indieWIRE. He is also the Director of Programming for Newfest: New York's LGBT Film Festival. He is currently working on his dissertation, Single Together: Resisting Marriage-as-Ideal in the Information Age, which explores various ways media is manipulated, produced, and consumed in ways that de-emphasize or question the dominance of marriage as a cultural and legal institution.
Eric Schatzberg is an associate professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing on the history of technology, technology and culture, and science and technology in the postwar era. He is the incoming director of the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.
Susan Squier received her education at Princeton University and Stanford University. She is Brill Professor of Women's Studies, English and STS (Science, Technology and Society) at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research Interests include: cultural studies of science and medicine; feminist theory; modernism; and comics and medicine.
Major Publications: Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (1985); Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994); Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (1984); Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (1989); Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (1999); Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (Duke University Press, 2003), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Duke University Press, 2004) and Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2011) which won the Michelle Kendrick Prize of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. With Dr. Ian Williams (UK) she co-edits the Penn State University Press book series, Graphic Medicine, which publishes scholarly studies of comics, as well as comics themselves, that enact and explore the experiences of health care, medicine, illness, and disability.
She was scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center (February-March 2001), Visiting Distinguished Fellow, LaTrobe University, Melbourne Australia (1992) and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Melbourne, Australia (1990-1991). She is Editorial Board member of the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Executive Board member and past President of the Society for Literature and Science. In Summer 2002, she co-directed (with Anne Hunsaker Hawkins) the NEH Summer Institute, "Medicine, Literature, and Culture," held at the Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey Medical Center. She is on the Editorial Board of the Penn State University Press, and the Selection Jury of the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize in 2011-2012, and she serves on the advisory board of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, The University of Western Australia, Perth.
Sai Suryan obtained his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his doctoral work with paper wasps, Sai found that nest vibrations performed by socially dominant wasps pre-dispose brood to develop into workers. The kinds of experiments that Sai's doctoral research entailed led him to question how the biosciences institute particular relationships with experimented-upon lives (be they human or non-human), and spurred his eventual entry into the social and historical studies of science. Sai is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Commmunity & Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In collaboration with Professor Daniel Kleinman, Sai studies the social and historical dimensions of Colony Collapse Disorder-- an ongoing phenomenon of mass die-offs of honey bees in the United States and elsewhere. His work examining the politics of knowledge regarding vanishing bees has appeared in the National Academy of Science's Issues in Science & Technology, and is forthcoming in Science, Technology, and Human Values.
Heather Swan is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research examines the human relationship with honeybees through time. She received an M.F.A. in poetry from the UW in 2007 and wanted to further investigate the ways in which art and literature are responding to issues of environmental destruction, exile, and extinction. Last spring an exhibit of her artwork called "Loss, Longing, and Belonging: Inhabiting the Human Body in an Endangered World" was hosted by CHE (Center for Culture, History, and Environment). Her poetry has appeared in The Cream City Review, Iris, Wisconsin People and Ideas, The Comstock Review, and others. Her short collection, The Edge of Damage won first prize from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets in 2009. She is also a beekeeper.