About Us

Arianna Ferrari is an ethicist and philosopher of science and technology with an extensive background in technology assessment,  the evaluation of visions related to technological futures (vision assessment) and human-animal studies. She obtained her obtained her PhD in Philosophy in 2006 between the University of Turin and the University of Tübingen in Germany. She has worked for the Universities of Darmstadt, Münster and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.  She then worked for a future-oriented museum (Futurium in Berlin) and an environmental NGO (NABU e.V.).

Birte Wrage was the 2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Studies at Queen’s University. They completed their PhD in philosophy on morality in nonhuman animals at the Messerli Research Institute (Vetmeduni Vienna, Uni Vienna, MedUni Vienna) in 2022. Their research is situated at the intersection of philosophy of animal minds and animal ethics, aiming to recognize nonhuman animals as more-than-sentient beings. Their work has been published in Philosophical Psychology, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, and Biology & Philosophy.

Carlo Salzani is a Gastforscher at the Messerli Research Institute of Vienna and a faculty member of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT). His research interests include animal ethics, literary animal studies, and biopolitics, and his last publications include the edited collections The Biopolitical Animal (2024) and Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020) and the book Agamben and the Animal (2022).

Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder is an animal studies scholar and podcaster. She has a PhD in geography from Queen’s University Canada and is interested in the urban animal histories and futures. Claudia is also the founder and host of The Animal Turn and Animal Highlight podcasts. She is currently an external lecturer in Change Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Doris Schneeberger is a Postdoctoral University Assistant at the Institute for Change Management and Management Development at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria. As part of her current research, she focuses on the role of nonhuman animals in organizations from a business ethics perspective. She is the author of Envisioning a Better Future for Nonhuman Animals: Towards Future Animal Rights Declarations, and has published her research in Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility and The Oxford Handbook of Animal Organization Studies, amongst many other publications.

Erich Linder is undertaking his PhD at the University of Vienna and is a DOC-fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and a prae-doc at the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine. His research focuses on descriptive approaches to moral philosophy. He is particularly interested in applying ideas from the Wittgensteinian and the constitutivist tradition to practical problems in animal ethics. He is also interested in moral psychology and the relation between psychoanalsiys and ethics.

Judith Benz-Schwarzburg is a Senior Researcher at the Messerli Research Institute (Vetmeduni Vienna, University Vienna, Meduni Vienna), working at the intersection of animal cognition and animal ethics. From 2018-2024 she was head of a FWF-funded research group on Morality in Animals: What it Means and Why it Matters. She has also worked on culture, language and theory of mind in animals, on zoo ethics, wildlife-tourism, and a range of other topics like animals in contemporary arts, personhood in great apes, and the role of animals in picture books. Her dissertation has been published by Brill in English under the title "Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers? Linking Animal Cognition, Animal Ethics & Animal Welfare". (Copyright of the Photo: David Ausserhofer/Körber Stiftung).

Konstantin studied ethics and philosophy in Munich and Vienna. He teaches at the University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. In his PhD, he developed a practice-oriented approach to animal ethics, drawing inspiration from Cora Diamond and Wittgenstein's later works. His research focuses primarily on animal ethics and animal philosophy but also extends to applied ethics, including topics such as biomedical innovations such as organoids and veterinary ethics. (Photo credit: ©Frank Helmrich).

Konstantin Eckl is a PhD student at the University of Vienna and a visiting scientist at the Vetmeduni Vienna. His main interests are in metaethics, ethical realism and the ethical implications of scientific naturalism. He is also part of the project "Possible Life" led by Tarja Knuuttila at the University of Vienna.

Leonie N. Bossert is an ethicist and political philosopher working on the intersection of animal, environmental, and technology ethics and philosophy, with a focus on theories of interspecies justice, AI’s

impact on nonhuman animals, and the normativity of non-anthropocentric technology development and deployment. She works as a post-doctoral university assistant at the Philosophy Institute at the University of Vienna, and she is a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at University of Bielefeld, the Young

Academy of the Heidelberger Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and an associate member of the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics Prague. Detailed information, including a complete list of publications, can be found on Leonie’s website.  (Photo Copyright: Universität Bielefeld P. Ottendörfer).

Samuel Camenzind is a postdoctoral researcher and APART-GSK fellow (Austrian Academy of Sciences, ÖAW) at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He studied at the University of Zurich, the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, and New York University. As a member of the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH), he advises federal authorities as part of an independent, interdisciplinary expert committee, providing ethical perspectives on issues related to non-human biotechnology and gene technology. Find out more about Samuel on his website.

Zipporah Weisberg is an adjunct professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies and the Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts at the University of Ottawa. From 2023-2024, Zipporah held a limited-term appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor of Critical Animal Studies in the Department of Sociology at Brock University. In March 2021, Zipporah was awarded a Culture and Animals Foundation grant for her project on animal agency in animal sanctuaries. Zipporah completed her PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University in 2013, and was the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University from 2013-2015. Her areas of specialization include critical animal studies, the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School, and existentialism and phenomenology. Zipporah has published on a wide range of topics, including climate justice and animal justice, the ethics and politics of cultured meat, the benefits and harms of animal assisted therapy, the ethical and ontological implications of biotechnology, and the psychopathology of speciesism. She is currently working on a book project on reinventing humanism as a multispecies political project and another on sanctuaries as a form of political refusal.