Shira Shmuely is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Department II and a lecturer at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Her research explores the intersections of scientific knowledge and law as they manifest in the history of biology, environmental history, and the history of human-animal relations. She is the author of The Bureaucracy of Empathy: Law, Vivisection, and Animal Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cornell University Press, 2023), which examines how physiologists, civil servants, and animal welfare campaigners developed ideas about pain while negotiating early regulations on animal experimentation. In her other publications, Shira examines questions of care, sentience, and extinction. Her current work focuses on analyzing how concepts of animal minds and subjectivity have emerged and evolved in legal and scientific discourses over the past two centuries.
Shira Shmuely received her PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds LLM and LLB degrees in law from Tel Aviv University.