Shira Shmuely

Shira Shmuely received her PhD in History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University, she joins Dept. III's The Body of the Animal Working Group at the MPIWG, where she will work on her research, "Man-Like Apes: Chimps, Gorillas, Orangutans and European Explorers. The study traces and analyzes British and European early attempts to make sense of great apes. In another project, she explores the transformation of poison arrow curare from a hunting technique to a laboratory tool. Shira's dissertation research, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), examined notions of pain undergirding early regulation of animal experimentation. Her book manuscript based on the dissertation is titled The Bureaucracy of Empathy: Vivisection, Law and Animal Pain in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Shira's main research interest lies in the intersection of law and the production of knowledge: history of pain, environmental history, and human-animal relations.