Zachary Ferguson, a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at UNC–Chapel Hill, was selected as the 2025 Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellow. Zachary is researching his dissertation on the evolution of the philosophical conversation about vegetarianism and veganism.
Zachary received his MA in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and BAs in both Philosophy and Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University. He has published in journals including Politics, Philosophy & Economics and AJOB Empirical Bioethics and has presented at conferences including the Rice Graduate Animal Ethics Conference in Houston and the North Carolina Philosophical Society Conference. “I’m a philosopher and I’m interested in arguments about moral vegetarianism and moral veganism—very much in the tradition of Tom Regan,” Zachary says. In 2019, CAF established the Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship at the North Carolina State University Libraries, where Tom deposited his archives in 2003, and which now, as part of the Special Collections Research Center, constitutes the largest scholarly archive of animal rights collections in the country.

Zachary discussed his research and experience of the library in a webinar in 2026. See below.