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About the Institute

The Animals & Society Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have, since 2017, co-hosted a new Human-Animal Studies Summer Institute program for advanced graduate students and early career scholars pursuing research in Human-Animal Studies. This program is focused on graduate students and those in the first few years post-Ph.D., and enables 20-30 participants to work on their dissertations or publications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign within the Center for Advanced Study, for one intensive week.

The Institute is designed to support participants’ individual research in human-animal studies as well as to promote interdisciplinary exchange. The program will offer a shared space of critical inquiry that brings the participants’ work-in-progress to the attention of a network of influential HAS scholars, and provides the participants with the guidance and feedback to develop their work. At the heart of the program are morning seminars devoted to discussion of participants’ work, followed by afternoon plenary lectures by distinguished speakers. These will be complemented by special workshops and field trips to on- and off-campus locations which highlight different aspects of the human-animal relationship. Participants should expect a stimulating intellectual environment reflecting a diversity of approaches, projects, disciplinary backgrounds, and ethical positions on animal issues. All fellows must be in continuous residence for the duration of the program, which takes place in mid-July.

About the Animals & Society Institute

The Animals & Society Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) independent research and educational organization that helps improve and expand knowledge about human-animal relationships in order to create safer and more compassionate communities for all. In particular, ASI exposes students and faculty to the study of human-animal relationships, providing them access to quality information about human-animal studies, including two peer-reviewed journals, Society & Animals and the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, the Human-Animal Studies Book Series, and other publications, as well as a wide variety of online materials to help faculty to develop and teach courses, and students to find the programs that suit their needs; provides information and resources to help those who are working in areas of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention and treatment of animal abuse to accomplish their goals, and create and promote diversion and treatment programs to help human service providers identify, evaluate, treat and/or appropriately refer individuals who abuse animals, including the AniCare® and AniCare® Child programs; and provides evidence-based, theoretically sound and useful knowledge about human-animal relationships to those who work to affect policy and practices involving animals.

Video from the inaugural institute