Dr. Keith Botelho, Professor of English at Kennesaw State University (GA), is the 2026 Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellow at NCSU’s Animal Rights & Animal Welfare archive.
Keith is conducting research for his book Dead Animals: An American Cultural History, which will draw upon collections of images of dead animals to chronicle how their afterlives are intimately tied to living humans and to show how they matter to a larger American story. He will spend almost two weeks at the SCRC in August and return for additional research sessions in October and December. And this isn’t Botelho’s first visit to the SCRC for this work. In summer 2024, while dropping off his son to begin a Ph.D. at NC State, he spent three days conducting preliminary research and left feeling that he had only seen a fraction of the relevant material.
Keith’s instructional focus is on Renaissance literature with particular attention to Shakespeare. His interest in the specifically American history of dead-animal imagery came from finding early-twentieth-century postcard images of people holding dead turkeys. Not a Thanksgiving turkey on a silver tray on a dinner table, but people posing for a photo holding a lifeless turkey by the neck. Why were these images taken? What exactly are they depicting? Keith was full of questions.
“I have hundreds of these images—people carrying dead turkeys,” he says. “So, I started thinking about that. This is pre–World War II. People got their food in different ways then, and these postcards are really reflective of that moment. How we get our food after World War II—you don’t see postcards that have anything really other than a cooked turkey, which represents, I think, the commercialization of our food supply, basically. That was my starting point.”
He started finding photographs of dead animals appearing in different contexts—butcher shop windows, taxidermy displays, hunting and trapping photography, and documentation of brutal Dust Bowl rabbit drives. These visual cultural materials began to connect to form an American cultural history.
“What do we do with these images now in the 21st century? How are we to read them?” Keith asks. “I started to ask questions about what I was seeing here. Number one—where else are dead animals and images of dead animals popping up, and in what contexts? That started pressing me into other areas and asking what kind of stories these tell about America in their moment.”
Keith is excited to return to the SCRC this year, now that the Regan Fellowship grants him so much more time to explore the collections he discovered in his brief visit in 2024, and to work with SCRC staff to uncover new materials.
For more on Keith’s research, click here. For more on the Regan Fellowship, click here.
