Utah State philosopher Rachel Robison-Greene is the Libraries’ first Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellow

The NC State University Libraries has awarded the first annual Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship to Dr. Rachel Robison-Greene, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Utah State University researching the in vitro meat revolution.

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 SCRC’s Animal Rights Archive—the largest scholarly archive of animal rights collections in the country.

“I was very excited to see the announcement for the Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship,” Robison-Greene says. “I have long been strongly influenced by the work of Regan. I’ve taught his work every semester in my ethics classes over the past eight years. His work has been very important to my research as well. I [am] delighted to have the opportunity to immerse myself further in Regan’s work, and to have access to the Animal Rights Archive.”

Robison-Greene received a $4,000 stipend to work in residence at the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) for four weeks spanning July and August, doing research for her in-progress book Under a Suitable Medium: Critically Analyzing the In Vitro Meat Revolution. She’s considering the ethics of in vitro, or “cultured,” meat from an animal rights perspective, studying the history of animal rights-based perspectives to consider what figures like Regan might have to say about the relatively new in vitro meat movement and the new technologies that are driving it. 

“A lot of people who were writing about animal rights 20 or 30 years ago wouldn’t have anticipated this strange new cell-culturing process for producing meat,” Robison-Greene says. “When Regan was writing, you just couldn't obtain animal flesh without killing the animal. So a lot of animal rights perspectives are strictly abolitionist in nature—we should never be using animals or animal products because we're treating animals as things rather than as living beings.”

Robison-Greene received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2018. Her dissertation was an exploration of the role of reflective endorsement in understanding the self and in judgments about what ought to be done. She is a regular columnist for the ethics periodical The Prindle Post, where she writes primarily about animal ethics, environmental ethics, and the ethical dilemmas we face as a result of emerging technologies. She is currently working on a book titled Under A Suitable Medium: Critically Analyzing the In Vitro Meat Revolution. She is the co-host of the popular culture and philosophy podcast, “I Think, Therefore I Fan.” Robison-Greene also sits on the Executive Board for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.