International Advisory Board

Dr. John C. Alessio

Alessio is Professor of Sociology at St. Cloud State University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1984. He has also taught at other Universities in the Midwestern and Eastern parts of the United States. He recently completed three years as an Academic Dean at Marywood University in Pennsylvania. Dr. Alessio initiated and co-developed the SCSU Masters Degree in Social Responsibility Program; teaching core courses in the program and serving as the program director before leaving for his dean’s position in Pennsylvania. He now teaches Social Problems and Social Psychology. Dr. Alessio’s research and writing interests have covered several areas. He has contributed to the field of Social Psychology by developing a balance/equity measurement procedure and corresponding formula, which he has applied to the prediction of cohesiveness in relationships. He has also published in other areas such as gender equity and curriculum transformation. As an animal rights advocate, Dr. Alessio has most recently been researching and writing about issues related to the treatment of non-human beings – information which he now integrates into his classes. He is most particularly interested in resolving apparent contradictions in some of the arguments of animal rights activists and scholars.

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Dr. Julie Andrzejewski

Andrzejewski is a professor, activist scholar, and Co-Director of the Master’s degree program in Social Responsibility at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. She was nominated the CASE Professor of the Year from SCSU in 2003. She has written numerous articles, is the editor of Oppression and Social Justice: Critical Frameworks, and co-author of Why Can’t Sharon Kowalski Come Home which was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award and received the national Lambda Literary Award. Andrzejewski has a long history of social action including founding a women's center, organizing nationally on GLBT, feminist, and disability issues, supporting legal actions against discriminatory institutions, serving as union president, initiating program development and curriculum transformation for global social responsibility; and directing grants to foster global peace and justice. She recently initiated a project to develop national education standards for social justice, peace, environmental, and humane education. In the 1980’s she read Animal Liberation and began changing her own life. She became a vegetarian in 1987 and began moving toward veganism and integrating Animal Rights and AR activism into all her classes in the early 1990’s. She says "moving toward" veganism because she came to understand that being a vegan is far more than what you do or do not eat, it is a comprehensive lifestyle committed to compassion in every area of life (Stepaniak, 2000). She is passionate about teaching Animal Rights and the important connections between animal rights and global social and environmental justice. She is currently writing about Animal Rights and Humane Education. She can be reached at jrandrzejewski@stcloudstate.edu.

Dr. Philip Armstrong
Philip Armstrong, M.A. (Auckland), Ph.D. (Wales), teaches English, Cultural Studies and Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand . He is Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, and has published articles and essays on the representation of animals in Society & Animals, ELH and Textual Practice. He is the editor (with Laurence Simmons) of Knowing Animals (forthcoming from Brill, 2007). His next authored book is entitled What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (forthcoming from Routledge, 2007), which surveys the representation of human-animal relationships in the novel in English from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Philip is also the national secretary of SAFE (Save Animals from Exploitation), New Zealand's largest animal rights organization

Dr. Piers Beirne

Beirne received his PH.D, in sociology from Durham University, England. He is Professor of Criminology and Legal Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Prior to working in Maine he taught sociology and criminology in England, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. He teaches courses on Criminology (CRM215), Crime in Maine (CRM317); Criminological Theory (CRM301); Animal Abuse (CRM 350); and Comparative Criminology (CRM401).

His books include an edited 6-volume reprint series The Chicago School of Criminology 1914-1945 (2006, Routledge); Criminology (2006, with Jim Messerschmidt); Issues in Comparative Criminology. (1997, with David Nelken); The Origins and Growth of Criminology: Essays on Intellectual History, 1760-1945 (1994); Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of `Homo Criminalis' (1993); Comparative Criminology: an Annotated Bibliography (1991, with Joan Hill); Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet Legal Theory, 1917-1938 (1990); Stuchka: Selected Writings on Soviet Law and Marxism (1988, with Robert Sharlet and Peter B.Maggs); Marxism and Law (1982, with Richard Quinney); Pashukanis: Selected Writings on Marxism and Law. (1980, with Robert Sharlet); and Fair Rent and Legal Fiction (1977). With Colin Sumner, he is the founding co-editor of the journal Theoretical Criminology. He likes to sail, kayak and windsurf, and dreams of redoing his 11,000 mile trip on a Triumph motorcycle.

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Dr. Stephen Clark

Stephen R.L.Clark has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK, since 1983, having previously lectured at Oxford and Glasgow Universities. His writings (for a complete list click here) include The Moral Status of Animals (1977), The Nature of the Beast (1982), How to Think about the Earth (1993), Animals and their Moral Standing (1997) and Biology and Christian Ethics (2000). He has served on the Farm Animal Welfare Council and on the Animal Procedures Committee (which advise the relevant government departments on issues related to the treatment of animals). He is at present at work on the ethics and psychology of the third century Platonist, Plotinus.

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Amie Breeze Harper

Amie Breeze Harper was born and raised in Lebanon, CT. She attended Dartmouth College as an undergraduate and Harvard University for her Masters program in Educational Technologies. In Fall 2005, she embarked on the first ever book project that brings together the voices of Black female vegans living in North America. The book, entitled, Sistah Vegan! Food, Health, Identity and Society: Black Female Vegans Speak will be released Fall 2007. Currently, she is a PhD student in Nutritional Geography at UC Davis where she is focusing on the intersections anti-racist praxis, critical race theory, and whiteness studies as it applies to the health and food ways of Black identified people living in the USA. email: breezeharper@gmail.com


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Dr. Maxwell Schnurer

Maxwell Schnurer received his Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication at Humboldt State in Arcata, California. A long time animal rights activist, Schnurer's work focuses on social movements, cultural change and activist strategies. He is the co-author of Many Sides: Debate Across the Curriculum (Idea Press, 2000).

Dr. Richard Twine

Richard Twine is the Principal Investigator on the ROAR project, part of the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen) funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (2002-2012). ROAR stands for 'Reconfigurations of Human/Animal Relations in Genomics and Beyond'. Prior to his  work on ROAR he was a member of the Bioethics Today project - an online bioethics resource where he wrote weekly commentaries, many related to animal ethics. In 1996 he formed the web-site www.ecofem.org the web's longest running web-site on the philosophy of ecofeminism.

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Cary Wolfe

Cary Wolfe is Dunlevie Professor English at Rice University. His books and edited collections include Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" from the University of Minnesota Press (1998), Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory from the University of Chicago Press (2003), and the edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, also from Minnesota (2003). He is currently finishing a fourth book, What Is Posthumanism?, and a co-edited collection with Branka Arsic entitled The Other Emerson. He is founding editor of the new series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press, which will publish four books a year, and continues to research and publish widely in areas such as systems theory, pragmatism, animal studies, posthumanism, poststructuralism, and American culture. He has delivered numerous lectures, keynote addresses, plenary talks, roundtables, and seminars in both North America and Europe in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, the UCLA Humanities Consortium, The Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, and the annual Summer Academy in Frankfurt, Germany, among others.

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