Editorial Team

  • Dr. Helena Pedersen
    Senior Co-Editor, Submissions and Review Process
    Malmo University
    helena.pedersen@mah.se


Helena Pedersen holds a Ph.D. in education and is a researcher in the School of Education at Malmö University. Her primary research interests include Critical Animal Studies, Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and Posthumanism. She is author of Animals in Schools: Processes and Strategies in Human-Animal Education (Purdue University Press, 2010, http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/animalsinschools.html). Animals in Schools recieved the Critical Animal Studies Book of the Year Award in 2010. Other recent works appear in the volumes Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter After Noah (Lexington Books, 2010); Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education: Transformative Standards (Routledge, 2009); Global Harms: Ecological Crime and Speciesism (Nova Science Publishers, 2008); and Values and Democracy in Education for Sustainable Development (Liber, 2008). Helena Pedersen received the American Sociological Association’s Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Scholarship (the Animals and Society Section) in 2006. Information on past and present research projects is available on her website: http://www.gender.uu.se/node286

________________________________________________________

  • Vasile Stănescu
    Senior Editor, Promotions and Outreach
    Stanford University
    vts@stanford.edu

Vasile is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University in the program of Modern Thought and Literature. He has already finished one book length manuscript and is currently finishing a second for his dissertation. The first entitled “Dying from Improvement: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and the New Eugenics” traces the idea of “letting die” from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben as a way to reveal the continuation of certain eugenical practices which continue after the end of the literal camps following World  War II, specifically in the postcolonial and global context. The second manuscript is tilted “Inhumanities: Critical Animal Studies, Biopolitics, and World Literature.” The essential argument is that the colonial and postcolonial space represents an area where the metaphor of the animal serves to disempower the colonized subject which serves to simultaneously disempower the colonized other, while providing new justifications for speciesism and continued anthropocentricism. This reality is demonstrated in the novels of world literature which reflect on the colonial and postcolonial condition and the image of the animal, such as the novels of J.M. Coetzee, Indra Sinha, and Bhanu Kapil, as well as in a variety of contemporary cultural examples such as Burger King’s recent advertising campaign “The Whopper Virgins,” as well as Michael Pollan’s text the Omnivores Dilemma. Vasile was nominated for the best graduate student paper at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference at Harvard, awarded “Best Graduate Paper” at the week long International Minding Animals Conference in Australia, serves  on the review board for the Journal of Critical Animal Studies, and just was named co-Senior Editor, along with Dr. Helena Pedersen of Malmo University, for the new Critical Animal book series by Rodopi Press.

_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

Critical Animal Studies Book Series Editorial Team