Tom Regan Visiting Fellowship Awardee Talks with Kat Poje

Tom Regan Visiting Fellowship Awardee Talks: "Humane Societies, Alternatives to Euthanasia, and Animal Experimentation in the Mid-Twentieth Century" with Kat Poje 

In this talk, Kat Poje will discuss how accessing animal protection materials at the Special Collections Research Center informed her research in the field of animal studies. Poje’s scholarly work focuses on how the practice and concept of animal euthanasia, or “good death,” emerged in the United States and became codified as a set of ethical norms, legal regulations, and scientific standards between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following Poje’s presentation, Special Collections staff will conduct a live unboxing of animal protection materials from the archive.

NC State University Libraries awarded Kat Poje the 2022 Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship. Intended to promote scholarly research in animal rights, the fellowship has been established through the generosity of the Culture & Animals Foundation (CAF) in memory of former NC State philosophy faculty member Tom Regan. The fellowship specifically supports access to the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), which houses the largest scholarly archive of animal protections materials in the country.

Bio
Kat Poje is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University. Her work focuses on the role of technology in relationships of violence and care across species. Focusing on the history of animal euthanasia in the United States, her dissertation examines how killing became a form of care for humane activists; and it tracks how animal advocates engaged technology and scientific experimentation to materialize their vision of a suffering-free death.