Jacob Brandler is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, serving in this latter capacity also as an associate editor of the Journal of Animal Ethics. 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 ‘Unfreeing 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
Brandler, Jacob. “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).]
