Faculty

Profile

Kate McClellan is an Assistant Professor (1-year visitor for 2023-24) at The New School for Social Research. Her research interests include human-animal relations, animal labor, and the politics of care. Her current book project, If We Were Animals: Human-Animal Care and Comparison in Jordan, under advance contract at The University of Chicago Press, explores the how and why humans and animals are increasingly entangled together as subjects of global aid and care. Recent publications examine the care politics of refuge; animal welfare education; stray dog control; and wildlife infrastructures in Jordan. Kate is also working on a project that traces the revival of a centuries-old system of Islamic land management call al-hima.

Degrees Held

PhD, 2010, University of Michigan

Recent Publications

(2023) “Refuge: Vital Trust beyond the Human.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41(2): 15-32. Special issue on Technologies and Infrastructures of Trust. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/cja/41/2/cja.41.issue-2.xml

(2022) “The Politics of Equivalence: (Post)Colonial Care and Transnational Animal Welfare in Jordan.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 30(3): 126-142.

(2022) “Demonstrating Trust in Jordan.” Allegra Lab. https://allegralaboratory.net/demonstrating-trust-in-jordan/

(2022) “Canine Life and Death: The Affective Politics of Stray Dog Management in Jordan.” Diyâr 3(1): 101-115. Special issue on Human-Animal Encounters in the Middle East.

(2021) “Electric Refuge: The Shock of Animal Infrastructure in Jordan.” Roadsides 006. https://roadsides.net/mcclellan-006/

(2019) “Becoming Animal People: Empathy Pedagogies and the Contested Politics of Care in Jordanian Animal Welfare Work.” Anthropological Quarterly 92(3): 787-816.

(2016) "Truth, Vision, and the Market: Displaying Religion in the Suqs of Damascus.” Material Religion 12(4): 433-456.

(2015) “Envisioning Multispecies Encounters: Photographing Fish in Illinois and Birds in Qatar.” Visual Anthropology Review 31(1): 87-93.

(2015) “Damascenes: Imagination, Memory, and Digitized Studio Aesthetics in Contemporary Syria.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8(2-3): 374-397.

(2013) “Presidents at Work: Shop Displays of Political Imagery in Pre-War Damascus.” Visual Anthropology Review 29(1): 16-28. (Featured in the October, 2016 issue of AAA’s digital journal Open Anthropology)

Awards And Honors

Select fellowships and grants:

(2021-22) Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship, for book-writing: “If We Were Animals: Human-Animal Care and Comparison in Jordan.”

(2016-18) PI, Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad grant, “Museums, Memory, and Contested Heritage in the Middle East,” U.S. Department of Education

(2014-15) National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and American Center of  Research / Council of American Overseas Research Centers Senior Fellowship, “Reviving Himas: Conservation and New Multispecies Traditions in Jordan and Lebanon”

(2014) National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, Oregon State University: “Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: Literature, the Arts, and Cinema since Independence.” (declined for NEH Postdoctoral Research Fellowship)

(2013) Social Science Research Council, Transregional Postdoctoral Fellowship (Finalist)

(2013) National Science Foundation Funded Short Course on Research Methods: Methods of Ethnoecology, Beaufort, NC

(2005-2006) Fulbright Grant and Fulbright Islamic Civilization Grant, Institute of International Education; for dissertation fieldwork in Syria