Dr Jan Dutkiewicz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute in New York. Much of his research focuses on the political economy of food; in addition to publishing research on this topic in academic journals, he's the author of many popular pieces in publications like The New York Times, Vox, and The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. In this episode, we talk about his book Feed The People! Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make it Even Better, which was co-authored with Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Feed the People was published by Basic Books in 2026.

This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press.

In his answers to the regular questions, Jan mentioned Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and the work of Dinesh Wadiwel. Jan's website is here: https://www.jandutkiewicz.com/

This episode's guest is Professor Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History. She's a historian of the early modern Atlantic interested in questions about how Europeans shaped the Americas and how Native American peoples shaped Europe. She's the author of the beautifully named 2008 book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, but we're going to talk primarily about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492.

This is a particularly special episode of Knowing Animals, as it is a tie-in with the Journal of the British Academy, with a written version of the interview appearing in the journal.

In answer to the regular questions, Marcy mentioned:

• J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Animals
• Her chapter 'Animal', in Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/753099
• Her chapter 'Going to the Birds' (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351055741-4/going-birds-marcy-norton) in the book Early Modern Things.
• Cora Diamond's paper 'Eating Meat and Eating People' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749876)
• And here is Marcy's Penn profile: https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/marcy-norton

On the 250th episode of Knowing Animals, the guest is Jin Qian, a PhD candidate at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. She researches China's environmental governance and its global implications, with a focus on the intersection of food, animals, and the environment. Her multidisciplinary PhD project focuses on wildlife in Chinese food systems. She's also involved in the animal movement in China, including hosting a podcast called Slightly Tofu. In the episode, we focus on her open access 2026 paper 'More-than-human practices in wild animal farming: The case of China's forest frogs', which was published in the Journal of Rural Studies and co-authored with Annah Zhu, Arjen Buijs, and Simon Bush.

• The paper we discuss is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016726001749
• If you want an overview of Jin's research area, see https://www.cell.com/one-earth/abstract/S2590-3322(25)00102-2 
• Jin's podcast is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%E6%9C%89%E7%82%B9%E8%B1%86%E8%85%90-slightly-tofu/id1794418651. It's also available on Spotify, YouTube, etc. It has two special series; Tofu International (with international guests, in English) and Tofu Across the Strait (with Taiwanese animal activists and podcasters)
• Jin's 'Lettuce Know' directory is here: https://lettuce-know.pages.dev/
• The works she mentioned in her regular questions were Garner and Francione's The Animal Rights Debate (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/fran14954), Wadiwel's 'Do fish resist?' (https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363), and Wadiwel's Animals and Capital (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.9941275).
• Jin is happy to talk to people interested in her research area: jin.qian[at]wur.nl
• The cover image is a photo Jin took of a free-living forest frog

On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He's the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, the 2023 collection Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation, and of the 2024 collection Veganarchism: Making Veganism and Anarchism Dangerous Again. We talk about the 2025 Lantern Publishing collection Exploring Topics in Non/Human Coexistence: Passion, Praxis, and Presence, which Nathan co-edited with Sarah Tomasello, Erin Jones, and Mark Suchyta. In particular, we dig into one of Nathan's chapters: 'Veganism as an overlooked component of anarchafeminism?'

In the quick questions, Nathan mentioned;

• Ignoring Nature No More, edited by Marc Bekoff. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo14398472.html
• His paper (with Sarah Tomasello) 'Polar Similar': https://animaliajournal.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/polar-similar-intersections-of-anthropology-and-conservation/
• John Tallent, author of How to Unite the Left on Animals (see an interview with Kim Stallwood here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-unite-on-101030529)
• His 'A6' Against Cultured Meat, co-authored with Richard Giles: https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/against-cultured-meat-a6/

On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He's the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, the 2023 collection Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation, and of the 2024 collection Veganarchism: Making Veganism and Anarchism Dangerous Again. We talk about the 2025 Lantern Publishing collection Exploring Topics in Non/Human Coexistence: Passion, Praxis, and Presence, which Nathan co-edited with Sarah Tomasello, Erin Jones, and Mark Suchyta. In particular, we dig into one of Nathan's chapters: 'Veganism as an overlooked component of anarchafeminism?'

In the quick questions, Nathan mentioned;

• Ignoring Nature No More, edited by Marc Bekoff. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo14398472.html
• His paper (with Sarah Tomasello) 'Polar Similar': https://animaliajournal.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/polar-similar-intersections-of-anthropology-and-conservation/
• John Tallent, author of How to Unite the Left on Animals (see an interview with Kim Stallwood here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-unite-on-101030529)
• His 'A6' Against Cultured Meat, co-authored with Richard Giles: https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/against-cultured-meat-a6/