PhD news: I passed my viva!

With my supervisors, Josh Milburn and Pete Yeandle

With my examiners, Matt Adams and Jane Hamlett

I am delighted to share the news that I passed my PhD viva voce this past Monday, with no corrections. It remains surreal that over three years of research and writing have now culminated, first with my thesis submission and now with its defence. The viva is, of course, a nerve-wracking prospect, but I am deeply thankful to my examiners, Professor Jane Hamlett (Royal Holloway) and Dr Matt Adams (Loughborough), for their thoughtful engagement, helpful comments, and intellectual curiosity. I was especially pleased to receive the following comment from Professor Hamlett: “Daniel has written a brilliant and engaging thesis, which challenges the way that the development of writing on animals has been understood in intellectual history as well as expanding our knowledge of two important nineteenth-century thinkers.” This is praise I will carry with me.

The thesis, Creeds of Kinship: An Animal-Human History of the Lives and Ideas of Anna Kingsford and Henry Salt, explores how animals can be understood not merely as symbols or moral problems, but as formative presences in intellectual life. Through an animal-human biographical lens, I trace how Anna Kingsford’s encounters with animals — from childhood companions, to vivisected bodies in Paris, to a beloved guinea pig mourned — shaped an ethic of stewardship that bridged science and mysticism. Alongside this, I follow Henry Salt from boy-naturalist to Darwinian ethicist, showing how everyday relations with animals, including those he lived alongside and cared for, culminated in his articulation of cooperative kinship in The Creed of Kinship (1935).

Methodologically, the project asks what happens to intellectual history if we take animals seriously as co-participants: as beings who provoke, resist, comfort, trouble, and inspire thought. I argue for the idea of animal-human encounter as multispecies dialogue, and for a more relational form of intellectual history — one attentive to affect, encounter, and the moral imagination as it unfolds across species lines.

I owe a great deal to my supervisors, Dr Pete Yeandle and Dr Josh Milburn, for their intellectual generosity and steady guidance, and to colleagues and friends who read drafts, asked difficult questions, and reminded me why this work matters. I am also thankful to the animals — historical and present — whose lives, however fleetingly recorded, left marks on human thought.

Looking ahead, I am now beginning the process of reworking the thesis into a monograph, while exploring postdoctoral opportunities that significantly expand on this research. My forthcoming article, “Animal Ethics and Vivisection in the Philosophy of Anna Kingsford,” in the Journal of the History of Ideas, will be one starting point for a larger project on Kingsford’s philosophical thought.