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Rosaleen Duffy is Professor of International Politics. She is a political ecologist and her research focuses on the international politics of wildlife conservation. Her most recent book is Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade (Yale University Press, 2022). She has led several large research projects that engage with questions of animal-human relations, including BIOSEC (ERC Advanced Investigator) and Beastly Business (ESRC). In this project Rosaleen will explore the themes of mutualisms and ideas of the nature-cure in human interactions with birds in conservation projects. 

For more information about their research, please visit Rosaleen’s full academic profile or Bluesky account.

Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield where he co-directs the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. His research focuses on the politics of species in modern and contemporary literature, film and critical theory. Publications include Anthropofugal Fictions: Literature, Species Politics and Flight from Humanity (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) and several co-edited volumes including Animal Satire (Palgrave, 2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (Palgrave, 2021). He is the co-editor, with Susan McHugh and John Miller, of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, and Managing Editor (Humanities) for the journal Society & Animals.

For more information about their research, please visit Robert’s full academic profile.

Eva Haifa Giraud is a senior lecturer in Digital Media & Society. She works across the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), media, and critical theory. She has a particular theoretical interest in whether the vocabulary of entanglement that has become central to understanding human-animal relations is sufficient for engaging with questions of inequality and exclusion. She has written about these themes in books such as What Comes After Entanglement (Duke, 2019), Veganism (Bloomsbury, 2021), and in the edited collection Digital Ecologies (Manchester, 2024). She is keen to explore these ideas further in Multispecies Mutualisms, to examine how novel developments in hypoallergenic dog breeding might complicate understandings of human-dog mutualism.

For more information about their research, please visit Eva’s full academic profile or Bluesky account.

Alasdair Cochrane is Professor of Political Theory. His research focuses on ‘animal politics’ which asks how our political institutions, values and structures affect the lives of animals, and how they might be transformed for the benefit of all. He has written many articles, chapters and books on this theme, including: Animal Rights without Liberation (Columbia, 2012); Sentientist Politics (Oxford, 2018); and Should Animals Have Political Rights? (Polity, 2020). He is looking forward to extending this exploration of whether social cooperation with animals is possible, and what it might look like, in Multispecies Mutualisms.

For more information about their research, please visit Alasdair’s full academic profile.

Lucy joined the Multispecies Mutualisms project as the Project Manager shortly after it began in September 2025. In this role, Lucy assists with strategic project planning, maintains the project website, manages project finances, organises events, assists in knowledge exchange and impact activities and oversees data collection protocols and storage.

Prior to this, Lucy was an Operations Manager in the Faculty of Social Sciences, supporting the Social Research Institutes. She has previously also had a stint in the School as a Project Manager, and is pleased to be back supporting this high-profile research project and working with some familiar colleagues again.

Kate Goldie is a more-than-human geographer with an interest in care and ethics of human-animal relations. Previous work has explored human relations with pigs within animal research laboratories and pet-keeping amid fraught and power-laden practices of care and harm. In the Multispecies Mutualism project, she explores the practices of mutualisms within hypoallergenic dog breeding and ownership to extend our understanding of shared human-dog worlds.

For more information about their research, please visit Kate’s LinkedIn account

Guillem Rubio-Ramon is a more-than-human geographer and political ecologist. His research centres on the justice implications of converging animal, human, and environmental harms. He has previously worked on industrial animal agriculture in Catalonia and Scotland, as well as street dogs and multispecies health in India. As a postdoctoral researcher on the Multispecies Mutualisms project, he examines the politics of mutualistic narratives in bird conservation to develop more comprehensive accounts of socio-ecological justice and multispecies wellbeing.

For more information about his research, please visit Guillem’s website or LinkedIn profile.

Maythe Han is an anthrozoologist, ethnographer, and artist. Her work traverses anthropology, history, STS, critical theory, and art to communicate the everyday significance and implications of living and becoming with our nonhuman contemporaries as a culturally specific form of domestication. Building on her doctoral work that explored more-than-human kinship with dogs in white, middle-class Edinburgh through writing, music, photography, and illustration, she is excited to examine how notions of health and wellness are understood, challenged, and complicated in equine assisted therapeutic practices.

Find out more about her work at maythehan.com. 

Dominic O’Key’s research asks how literary and cultural texts make sense of our relationships with animals. He is the author of Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals (Bloomsbury, 2022) as well as several other publications that track the species politics of wildlife conservation, mass extinction, museums, medical research, and factory farming. He is an Associate Editor at the open-access journal Humanimalia. As a Research Associate on the Multispecies Mutualisms project, Dominic focuses on how animals are used, literally and symbolically, in constructions of healthy diets.