A photo I took of our dog Penny when she was 15.
Backstory
My earliest memories are about animals: sitting quietly with dogs and gently stroking cats. Both were lessons in empathy and kindness from a very young age.
I was born in upstate New York and raised in an English village, settings where everything was quiet and green. With an energetic and extroverted older brother, I spent my time writing stories, playing make believe in the garden, and trying to understand the animals around me.
With scientist parents, I was raised on a lot of sci-fi. To me, animals were like approachable aliens. We each have our own intelligence and rich interior lives, but we can’t speak the same language. We just have to work a bit harder to communicate with each other. This seemed to work well with the animals I knew best, our cats and dogs, who were like family members to me. Yet the rest of the world seemed to treat animals like robots who act on instinct and nothing more.
At university, I followed my passion for stories and empathy to study English literature. I remember sitting in a first-year undergraduate seminar and thinking: “we study all aspects of humanity, but does anyone study animals in fiction?” Nah. I dismissed it as a silly idea and never voiced the question. This was long before the topic of animals and literature had become a respectable area of research. Years later, towards the end of my Masters degree, we were introduced to new scholarship in animals and philosophy. Finally! I knew I had to do a PhD. I ended up applying with two research projects, one about humans and one about animals. My heart was with the latter.
Research
My PhD research began by focusing on the realistic depiction of animal protagonists in literature. I wanted to know how people tried to write from the perspectives of other species. I focused on Canadian fiction because I had spent a year studying at Carleton university and had come across some interesting writers.
Inevitably, the deeper I delved, the more I wanted to include in my thesis. Probably the most fascinating discovery was the strange history of Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts, and the Nature Fakers controversy. Seton and Roberts did what I wanted—they tried to write about animals realistically and accurately—and their stories were enormously popular. Yet they also faced criticism and ridicule from prominent people, like the famous naturalist John Burroughs and even President Theodore Roosevelt. I have never quite managed to let go of this topic, as much as I have expanded my research since.
After finishing my PhD, I was invited to publish my work as a book in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series. To make it more useful for students, I wanted to plug the gaps left in the timeline of my thesis, which had jumped from the 1900s to the 1950s to the 1990s.
As I dug into the history, I made even more discoveries. One of the most puzzling was that Canada, which had produced such compassionate animal stories, only protected animals as ‘human property’ in the law. This meant that killing a pet was akin to destroying a fence. It also meant that wild animals were almost entirely unprotected. Somehow the nation’s animal cruelty laws had not progressed since they were first established in the Victorian era. I had to find out why.
After spending many years expanding my research, refinining my arguments, and polishing my writing, I finally published Literature, Science and Animal Advocacy in Canada: Practical Zoocriticism in October 2023.
Now
Today I am an independent scholar and a freelance writer, editor, and consultant. I have two missions that drive my work.
One is to improve our ability to communicate on behalf of other species. In my research and writing, I study animals at the intersection of science, culture, and politics. I specialize in the fields of the fields of human-animal studies, animal ethics, conservation, environmental history and ecocriticism, science history and communication, and British and North American history and literature.
I peer review new research for the interdisciplinary journal Society & Animals and I am on the editorial board for the relaunch of Sloth: A Journal of Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies. I also want to leverage my research experience to create real change for animals through advocacy and policy change.
My other mission is to help other people with their writing. Throughout university and the writing of my book, I had struggled with perfectionism and knowing when to stop. I was excited to include my fascinating historical discoveries, but I was also afraid to finish and add that final ‘full stop.’ Ironically, I was writing about compassion for animals yet wasn’t showing compassion to myself.
I find great satisfaction in helping people to polish their writing, work through common blocks in the process, and find the ‘full stop’ to finish their projects.
