Research Fellows

Jacob Brandler

Jacob Brandler
is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. Jacob completed a DPhil in history at the University of Oxford in 2025, also holding a JD from Cornell University and an MA in history from Missouri State University. Ongoing research interests include intellectual history, the praxis of veganism and anti-carnism, and the social construction of concepts, such as humanity and animality. Recently, these scholarly pursuits led to a dissertation entitled “Un-freeing the Other: The Reinvention of American Human Exceptionalism in the Antebellum United States, 1839-1859” which explored how racial science in the mid-Nineteenth Century, American polygenism, and the responses of Frederick Douglass, remade the meaning of humanity and its intersection with the legal regimes and social imagination forming the American nation-state of the United States. Publications include: “Do ‘Animals’ Have Histor(ies)? Can/Should Humans Know Them? A Heuristic Reframing of Animal-Human Relationships.” Journal of Animal Ethics. Vol 12, No. 2 (2022): 148-157. [Republished in Animal History: History as If Animals Mattered (Wipf and Stock, 2025).] He is a former president of the Oxford University Animal Ethics Society.

Mirjam von Bechtolsheim

Mirjam von Bechtolsheim
is an early career research associate at the Institute of Classical Studies in the University of London. A classical archaeologist by training, Mirjam completed her PhD on the material culture and religious practices of the people of ancient Umbria (Italy) at the Open University and Fitzwilliam Museum in the University of Cambridge in 2025. Throughout her doctoral research, she maintained a visiting studentship with the University of Oxford, where she had previously studied for her MPhil in Classical Archaeology and her BA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History. She is a long-standing member of the Oxford University Animal Ethics Society and has presented on animal sacrifice in Roman England at the Society as well as at the Animal History Group’s Summer Conference. She is keenly interested in research that challenges current assumptions about the status and rights of animals, explores their ethical and historical underpinnings, and suggests new ethical perspectives on human-animal relationships.

Malcolm Hay

Malcolm Hay
completed his doctoral thesis, “Other Perspectives: The Representation of Animals in the Poetry of Thomson, Smart, Cowper and Burns” at the University of Oxford in October 2024. In 2023, he received a Postgraduate Research Award from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for his paper “Animals at Work and Play in the Poetry of Robert Burns.” Malcolm has served as an ambassador at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics Summer School in 2024 and 2025. He also delivered two papers at these events. The first was about the animal thinker Christopher Smart, and the second looked at the plight of caged birds in eighteenth-century Britain. The summer 2025 edition of the JAE published his paper “The Struggle for Ethical Compassion in Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse.”” Malcolm’s research mainly focuses on eighteenth-century English literature. He is an alumni of the Oxford University Animal Ethics Society.