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. 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.
A selection of items from the Tom Regan collection at NCSU
Fellows
In 2025, CAF chose for the fellowship Zachary Ferguson, a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at UNC–Chapel Hill, to research his dissertation on the evolution of the philosophical conversation about vegetarianism and veganism. In 2024, Kaitlyn Kitchen, a rising senior at Appalachian State University, and Sarah Scott, a professor of philosophy at Manhattan College in Riverdale, NY, used the archive, respectively, to research how animal rights organizations used gendered appeals as a form of advocacy, and to trace the philosophical arguments used in nineteenth-century animal and anti-vivisection advocacy and relate them to contemporary debates. The two fellows discussed their work in a webinar in 2025.
In 2023, historian Whitney Barlow Robles conducted research for her second book, The Collector’s Paradox: Specimens, Species, and Loss, which explores specimen collecting’s contradictory relationship with both preservation and destruction. She wrote about her experiences here. In 2022. Harvard historian of science Kat Poje (left) and anthrozoologist Joshua Russell were fellows, and you can read about their experiences here and here, respectively. The first recipient, in 2019 was Rachel Robison-Greene, who explored the archives for her book Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations. Due to the pandemic, no fellowships were awarded in 2020 and 2021.
