The Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship
In 2000, the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at the NC State University Libraries established the Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive, which consists of notes, letters, manuscripts and typescripts, books and pamphlets, and audiovisual materials documenting Tom’s work, as well as other material relating to the history of the animal advocacy movement. Since then, the archive has grown into the largest scholarly archive of animal rights and welfare collections in North America. In addition to Tom Regan’s papers extending over fifty years and the Culture & Animals Foundation collection from 1985 to 2001, the archive contains pamphlets on animal protection from 1874 to 1951, the records of the Animal Rights Network and the Animal Welfare Institute from 1903 to 2003, the Argus Archives of work from 1937 to 2004, and Wim DeKok’s Animal Rights Collection from 1911 to 2016. In 2022, the archive welcomed material from The Humane Society of the United States and from HSUS VP Bernard Unti.
A selection of items from the Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive at NCSU
To encourage scholarly engagement with the Archive and animal rights, CAF and SCRC established an annual fellowship in memory of Tom Regan. The fellowship provides a $5,000 stipend to a qualified applicant for research completed in residence at the SCRC.
Kaitlyn Kitchen (left) and Sarah Scott
In 2024, the Tom Regan Research fellows are Kaitlyn Kitchen (left), a rising senior at Appalachian State University, and Sarah Scott, a professor of philosophy at Manhattan College in Riverdale, NY. Kitchen will research the archive 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. Sarah Scott, who is writing a monograph on the moral philosophy of British anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), plans to use the archive to trace the philosophical arguments used in nineteenth-century animal and anti-vivisection advocacy and relate them to contemporary debates.
In 2023, historian Whitney Barlow Robles (left: Photo: Katie Lenhart) was chosen as the Tom Regan Research Fellow. She aimed to do research toward her second book, The Collector’s Paradox: Specimens, Species, and Loss, which explores specimen collecting’s contradictory relationship with both preservation and destruction. She investigated the ethics of the history of collecting through the lens of this paradox by examining SCRC holdings of researchers such as Catherine Roberts. She wrote about her experience in the archive in October 2023.
In 2022, CAF and SCRC awarded two fellowships: to Harvard historian of science Kat Poje (left) and anthrozoologist Joshua Russell. You can read about Kat and Joshua’s experiences here and here, respectively.
The first recipient of the Visiting Research Fellowship was Rachel Robison-Greene in 2019 (see below). As a result of her research, Rachel was able to publish her book Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations.
Due to the pandemic, no fellowships were awarded in 2020 and 2021.
