Aotearoa New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies

I teach literary studies (especially Shakespeare) and (at graduate level) creative writing.

 

My research involves analysis of the ways in which the natural world is represented in culture and literature.  My scholarly books include Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature (Routledge 2025), Sheep (Reaktion 2016), A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in our Culture, History and Everyday Life (co-authored with Annie Potts and Deidre Brown, Auckland University Press 2013), What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (Routledge 2008), Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2001), and Shakespeare's Visual Regime (Palgrave 2000).

 

My creative work, which includes poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction, has been published in a range of journals and anthologies in Aotearoa, Australia, the UK, and the USA. I have published two collections of poetry: Sinking Lessons (Otago University Press 2020), which won the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry in 2019, and Touch Screen (Otago University Press 2025). "Tenuous Grounds", a piece on the Canterbury earthquakes, won the 2011 Landfall Essay Prize.

My main research interests lie within the field of Māori and Indigenous literatures; my PhD thesis completed in 2022 is a study and celebration of Māori writing in English wherein I use various invocations of whakapapa and draw upon pūrākau to read a range of contemporary texts featuring representations of the more-than-human. Inspired by Indigenous literary scholars and decolonizing research methodologies, I situate these texts in an expansive whakapapa of creative production; I therefore have related research interests in Māori and Indigenous art, art history and curation, taonga tuku iho and museum studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Indigenous ecopoetics, and Māori and Indigenous research methodologies more generally.  

 

My current research, funded by a Marsden fast-start grant awarded in 2023, is based upon our taniwha relatives.  As part of this kaupapa, myself and co-researcher Dr Madi Williams along with Pouarataki Curator Māori Chloe Cull curated "Whāia Te Taniwha" - an art exhibition at Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery (Sept 2025-Feb 2026).  We are currently working on an illustrated book based on this research.

 

I also have an interest in Critical Animal Studies and multispecies justice; my MA thesis involved a study of contemporary fictional representations of meat production and consumption in the West.   This work prompted research into Māori and Indigenous food sovereignty, mahi māra (gardening), and Indigenous plant-based food ethics.  I am a member of the NZ Centre for Human Animal Studies (NZCHAS) based at UC.

Rosie Ibbotson's research centres on the long nineteenth century, and concerns the entanglements of visual representation and environmental change. She is writing a book titled 'Picturing the imperial Anthropocene: Visual representation and environmental change in the long nineteenth century', and recently she has published on the intersections of visual and material culture and de-extinction. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Canterbury, Rosie completed a doctorate focusing on the transnational Arts and Crafts Movement, before taking up a Postdoctoral Research Associateship at the Yale Center for British Art.

My main field of research is literary studies, with the focus on literature and cultural history and society from nineteenth century to the present. I have published on Russian/Soviet, European and South African literature as well as on Russophone emigre writing. 

 I have written on the literary canon (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev), on "forgotten" classics, such as Gleb Uspensky, and pioneered work on formerly forbidden writers and thinkers (Konstantin Leontiev and Vasily Rozanov).  I am particularly interested in cultural and scientific underpinnings of discourses of alterity in ethnicity, gender and species.  My approch is cross-cultural and interdisciplinary.

I have authored twelve academic books, including Embodied Differences (2021), Dostoevsky i evrei (2021), Political Animals (2015), Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature (2010), Exemplary Bodies (2010),  Pure, Strong and Sexless: Gleb Uspensky and the Peasant Woman's Body (2005), Pisateli-narodniki i evrei (2005) among others, all of which have been reviewed in leading academic journals internationally in a number of languages.

 

I received a number of international reseach fellowships, including Distinguished Fellowship and Senior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University, Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Stellenbosch, Skirball Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Fellowship at the Bundesinstitut for East European Studies in Colognue, Research Fellowship awarded by the Joint Committee on Soviet Studies by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research  Council.

 

I gave guest lectures and research seminars in a number of universities worldwide, including UK, US, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Russia, South Africa, China, Japan.

I am  Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand since 2009. 

My research over the past decade has been interdisciplinary and intersectional, with a focus on the ways in which human-to-human forms of oppression, marginalization and discrimination are connected to human-to-animal forms of oppression and exploitation.

Some of the topics and issues I've studied include human-animal relations in times of disaster, the traditional pets of Māori, ethical consumption in Aotearoa New Zealand, the phenomenon of vegan sexuality, the intersectional influences of Prince (musician), the cultural demonization of possums and other 'pests' in Aotearoa, the natural and cultural history of Gallus gallus (chickens), activist art, meat consumption and patriotism, animal advocacy in visual culture.

I am currently completing a book on the natural and cultural histories of possums (from the Americas to Australasia) for Sydney University Press.

I am a postdoctoral research fellow currently affiliated with Canterbury University in Aotearoa New Zealand and Aarhus University in Denmark. My research is situated at the intersection of media studies, environmental communication, and audience reception research. Most of my work investigates how media - and cultural texts more generally - shape public perceptions of the environment and the meanings we attach to it. Alongside this focus, I am also interested in ecocriticism, ecocinema, critical human-animal studies, narratology, visual culture, affect theory, models of cultural circulation, ecolinguistics, corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and a host of digital methods, both quantitative and qualitative. 

 

Beyond research, I lecture and tutor on the Digital Screen Programme and Cinema Studies at UC, where I teach story development, screenwriting, and film analysis. I have 10+ years of teaching in higher education across various positions at Aarhus University (DK), Aalborg University (DK), VIA University College (DK), South Gate Society (DK), Lincoln University (NZ), and University of Canterbury (NZ).

I am also affiliated with the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies (NZCHAS) at UC, where I recently completed a 2-year project as Principal Investigator (PI) of the project: “Bridging the Gap: Qualitative Empirical Ecocriticism and the Impact of Environmental Narrative”. The project was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (DK) and explored the reception of food documentaries in Aotearoa New Zealand.

My work has appeared in some of the highest ranking international journals in the humanities, such as Environmental Humanities (Q1), Metacritic (Q1), Extractive Industries and Society (Q1), Green Letters, (Q2; ASLE-UKIP's flagship journal in ecocriticism), Oxford Intersections (Oxford University Press), as well as the edited volume Empirical Ecocriticism: Narratives for Social Change (University of Minnesota Press).

Projects and Research Grants:
2026-2028 (Prinicipal Investigator, PI): "The Afterlives of Stories: Exploring the Long-term Impact of Environmental Narratives." Postdoc reintegration fellowship funded by Carlsberg Foundation (1,945,091 DKK ≈ 514,000 NZD).
2024-2025 (Co-applicant): "N.E.S.T. Research Network: Narratives for Ecological and Sustainable Transition(s)." Network catalyst grant funded by NextGenerationEU (14,000 EUR ≈ 28,000 NZD).

2023-2025 (Principal Investigator, PI): "Bridging the Gap: Qualitative Empiritical Ecocriticism and the Impact of Environmental Narrative." Post-doc internationalisation fellowship funded by Carlsberg Foundation (900,000 DKK ≈ 210,00 NZD).
2019-2022 (Main Applicant): "Cinematic Waesthetics: An Investigation of the Aesthetics of Waste in Contemporary Film and Television." PhD Scholarship funded by Aarhus University (944,000 DKK ≈ 250,000 NZD)

2016-2018 (Main Applicant): "Distinguished Masters." Scholarship funded by Peter and Emma Thomsen Foundation (100,000 DKK ≈ 28,000 NZD)

(Dr.) Nik Taylor is a critical and public sociologist who has published many articles, books and book chapters. Her research focusses on mechanisms of power and marginalisation expressed in/through human relations with other species and is informed by critical/ intersectional feminism. Nik is currently the co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where she also teaches topics in the Human Services program that focus on human-animal violence links; scholar-advocacy; social change, and crime and deviance, particularly domestic violence and animal abuse. Nik’s latest books include Queer Entanglements (Cambridge University Press, 2021 with Damien Riggs, Heather Fraser and Shoshana Rosenberg) and Rescuing Me, Rescuing You: Companion Animals and Domestic Violence (Palgrave, 2019, with Heather Fraser).

 

Read about my work in The Conversation

Read about my work at my blog: Animals in Society: Animal Studies Animal Advocacy

Find copies of my work freely at Researchgate

Find out more about the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies

 

 

Michael-John is a senior lecturer in philosophy who takes a scientifically-informed, interdisciplinary approach to ethics and moral psychology. He has published numerous articles on topics such as ethics of technology, animal ethics, emotion, meaning in life, and epistemology. This work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Ethics, Ethics and Information Technology and Social Psychological and Personality Science. He is currently or recently supervising graduate students on the role of empathy in moral decision-making, human-robot interaction, vice epistemology, moral psychology, meaning in life, and bioethics.

 

Michael-John has held visiting positions at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Oxford Brookes University and the University of Durham. He is a member of the University of Canterbury Artificial Intelligence Research Group and the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies.

Research interests include Te Waipounamu iwi histories and New Zealand history. Particular focus on the histories of Te Tauihu, oral traditions and myth. The Global Middle Ages with a focus on Polynesia.