Kari Weil has published widely on feminist theory, questions of gender in 19th and 20th century French and European literature, and, most recently, on theories and representations of animal otherness and human-animal relations. She is the author of Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia UP, 2012) and Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia, 1994). Her current book project, Meat, Motion, Magnetism: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century Paris, examines role of the horse as object of love, labor, sport and food in the literary, visual and socio-political debates of the day.

Born and raised in Chicago, Kari Weil earned her B.A. in French from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, specializing in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century France and Feminist Theory. Before coming to Wesleyan she was the Chair of Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts where she began teaching courses in Animal Studies (winning the Humane Society’s “Best Course Award” for 2006) as well as in literature and theory. She has also taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Irvine, Middlebury College and was previously tenured in Romance Languages at Wake Forest University.