The Libraries announces two Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellows for 2024

The Libraries has awarded two 2024 Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowships to Kaitlyn Kitchen, a rising senior at Appalachian State University, and Sarah Scott, a professor of philosophy at Manhattan College in Riverdale, NY. The scholars will visit the Libraries for their month-long fellowships this summer.

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 scholar, author and former NC State philosophy faculty member Tom Regan. The fellowship specifically supports the use of the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) Animal Rights Archive—the largest scholarly archive of animal rights collections in the country.

The annual Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship debuted in 2019, when inaugural fellow Utah State professor Rachel Robison-Greene visited the SCRC to work on a critical analysis of in vitro, or “cultured,” meat. Each fellowship provides a stipend awarded to a qualified applicant for research completed in residence at the SCRC for a term of no less than four weeks to begin on or after July 1.

Kitchen is a rising senior at Appalachian State University, where they are majoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Philosophy. Their thesis project considers the potential limitations of animal rights organizations from feminist and anti-racist perspectives, with a strong consideration for the positive impacts of these groups. Kitchen will focus on how animal rights organizations used gendered appeals as a form of advocacy, such as sentimental fiction in the nineteenth century and sexualized billboards of vegan celebrity women in the twentieth century.

In his text, “The Case for Animal Rights,” Tom Regan wrote, “Those involved in the animal rights movement are partners in the struggle to secure respect for human rights—the rights of women, for example, or minorities, or workers. The animal rights movement is cut from the same moral cloth as these.” Although Regan was not known to be a feminist philosopher, Kitchen takes this as his acknowledgment of the fundamental interconnectedness of the animal rights movement and other movements that seek to end differing systems of oppression. 

“When one system of oppression is granted the environment to exist, this creates space for other oppressions to endure,” Kitchen says. “In order to end oppression, you must eliminate all oppressive structures. It is easy to connect other systems of oppression that impact humans to the oppressive systems that disenfranchise non-human animals.”

At the SCRC, Kitchen plans to review Tom Regan’s archived correspondence regarding “Feminism and Vivisection” and the journal Feminists for Animal Rights in order to develop a feminist reading of Regan’s work. They will also look at other thinkers throughout the collection, as well as the archives of Feminists for Animal Rights, to understand the relationship between animal rights thinkers and gender.

Additionally, Kitchen will explore the Animal Rights and Animal Welfare pamphlets and the Betty B. Eilers Collection—which houses multiple scrapbooks that include animal rights pamphlets, the minutes of animal rights group meetings, and information about animal rights groups—to glean a historical perspective of animal rights and to assess the way that activism has become gendered due to the emotional appeals used to support their points.

Kitchen sees a contemporary example of such gendering of activism in PETA campaigns. “PETA often utilizes scantily-clad women who pose in a sensual manner,” they say. “An example with Pamela Anderson was the ‘All Animals Have the Same Parts’ movement. The image details Anderson naked with markings throughout her body that reflect the mirroring portions that would be sold as meat if they were on a non-human animal.”

“I am excited to see as much as I can see in this archive,” Kitchen says. “Researching online is valuable—however, there is a significant amount of historical information in these archives that I cannot find elsewhere. Developing my ideas through the archive would provide deeper insight into an analysis on animal rights movements.”

This year’s other Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellow, Scott, is a professor of philosophy at Manhattan College who is writing a monograph on the moral philosophy of British philosopher Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). In addition to her fellowship at the Libraries, Scott will also be a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park this fall. 

Although Cobbe was a well-known thinker in her day, publishing widely and writing editorials for the London evening newspaper The Echo that reached 100,000 readers, she has been largely forgotten. The influence of her 1878 essay “Wife-Torture in England” helped to pass the Matrimonial Causes Act, which enabled women to separate from abusive spouses. Her animal welfare activism included the founding of the Victoria Street Society (1875; now the National Anti-Vivisection Society) and the British Union Against Vivisection (1898; now Cruelty Free International). Scott notes that, whether or not people know Cobbe’s name, her legacy lives on every time a woman is able to divorce an abusive spouse or an animal is saved from testing.

“At a time when domestic violence and animal experimentation were normalized, Cobbe developed a groundbreaking framework for understanding both as forms of torture,” Scott says. “She explored why women and animals are seen as ‘beatable’ and as existing outside of moral law. She had to figure out what counts as evidence for moral arguments when patterns of sympathy lead most readers to dismiss the evidence of the suffering of women and animals. All of these problems are ongoing, and we can learn as much from Cobbe’s rhetorical tactics as we can from her moral theories.”

While Cobbe’s life has been written about, her moral philosophy has not. As a woman, Cobbe was not allowed to attend college, much less teach there. Her publications were also outside of the philosophical mainstream of her time. Scott plans to examine the diverse range of Cobbe’s writing, including little-studied modes of writing such as her correspondence, and to analyze her influences, interlocutors, and ongoing relevance. 

“In fact, Cobbe was read more widely than most philosophy professors of her day,” Scott notes. “She used the methods of academic philosophic essays, but published in accessible popular form, including hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Other writings include her lectures for women, published in Duties of Women, which went through numerous editions in multiple countries, and her anti-vivisection pamphlets. Both are examples of how subcultures, either blocked from academia, such as women, or opposing establishment practices, such as anti-vivisectionists, can produce rigorous, alternative moral theories that still remain to be explored by current moral philosophers.”

In the Animal Rights Archive, Scott plans to trace the philosophic arguments used in nineteenth-century animal and anti-vivisection advocacy and relate them to contemporary debates. Cobbe was a correspondent with figures as diverse as Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Queen of England, and Scott will seek out relevant works in the archives by others of Cobbe’s correspondents.