Elan Abrell

Elan Abrell is an assistant professor Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University. He is also the coordinator of Wesleyan’s Animal Studies minor. He received his J.D. from Berkeley Law School at the University of California, and his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Previously, Dr. Abrell was a Farmed Animal Law & Policy Fellow at the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, and a visiting assistant professor of Anthropology and Animal Studies at New York University. His work has appeared in numerous edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, and his book Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care (2021, University of Minnesota Press) – an ethnography of animal sanctuaries throughout the U.S. – won the 2022 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Session: Prefigurative Animal Law: Actualizing Human-animal Utopias in the Here and Now