Kat Grace Poje
Research Interests: Animal studies, history of veterinary medicine, ethics, death, American history, history of race and racism.
Kat studies the 19th-21st century scientific, legal, and ethical history of animal euthanasia. Drawing together the history of veterinary medicine, the history of animal advocacy, and the history of race and racism, her dissertation examines how we came to understand certain methods of killing animals as more humane than others. It tracks the transformation of public animal culling in antellebellum America into the privatized, medicalized, and professionalized practice of animal population management in the present. Ultimately, it questions how an elite white Christian vision of the humane became a pervasive American mandate for the keeping and killing of animals.
Kat co-organizes the HistSTM Early Career Collective’s Radical Professionalization Series.
Previous Degrees:
B.A., Haverford College
M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School