Research
My work in the area of animal studies combines cutting-edge science with field/personal experience. My book Enter the Animal , a Nautilus Award winner and short-listed for the American Academy of Religion book awards (2022), was launched through a panel discussion with distinguished scholars. The book looks at grief and spirituality from a cross-species perspective but I'm interested in all aspects of animal subjectivity.
Read an excerpt from the book.
Readers' impressions:
Enter the Animal is a fascinating journey into the hearts and minds of nonhuman animals and our shared capacities for experiencing a wide variety of deep and rich emotions. Employing an impressively broad scope of interdisciplinary research, this most important and forward-looking book offers a lucid, engrossing, and insightful exploration of the capacities for grief and spiritual engagement that humans share with other animals. – Marc Bekoff, Ph.D., author of The Emotional Lives of Animals, Rewilding Our Hearts and The Animals' Agenda
This path-breaking book engages a surprising range of sources to shed extraordinary clarity on aspects of animal subjectivity that make other species every bit our equal. I could not stop reading. – Cynthia Willett, author of Interspecies Ethics
This is a very impressive book which illuminates human-nonhuman animal relations with its thorough research and sophisticated theoretical analysis. It is crucial reading for anyone interested in grief in animals. – Peta Tait, author of Fighting Nature and Wild and Dangerous Performances
It is clear, and easy to read, and easy, as well, to understand. Whether you are a scholar in the broad area of animal studies, a student embarking upon animal-related research or simply a reader interested in all matters animal, this is an essential book, which will help you understand three fundamental points: where we are currently, how we got here, and where to go next. – Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep and Lost Companions
Enter the Animal offers a moving exploration of the ways in which grief is a cross-species phenomenon that manifests in a diversity of expressions and experiences. Reading this beautifully written book informs ways of thinking about the political work grief, and acknowledging grief, does for other species as well as our own. A wonderful contribution to scholarship on animal subjectivity, sociality, and grief specifically. - Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow With Ear Tag #1389
Enter the Animal (...) stages a truly interdisciplinary conversation, finding a common platform for the humanities and the sciences to speak together without subsuming one into the other. (...) The personal and the academic are woven together in this book in a way that very few scholarly works manage to achieve. - Donovan O. Schaefer, author of Religious Affects, in ASJ review.
Selected publications:
Some recent blog posts:
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Shelter, culture, and the good waves to catch.' Counterpoint 2024.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Reaching for the stars: notes from the magic-detection project.' Counterpoint 2022.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'The accidental simplifier: on smoking, animals and happiness.' Counterpoint 2022.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'The weight of evidence.' Counterpoint 2021.
Brooks Pribac, T., and D. L. Merskin. 'Becoming animal.' AASA 2020.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'On letting people die.' Counterpoint 2020.
Peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, commentaries, presentations:
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Je Suis, Je Suis - I Am, I Follow: Formation of Animal Individual and Cultural Selves.' In Michael Glover and Les Mitchell (eds.), Animals as experiencing entities: narratives, perspectives, theories. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
Brooks Pribac, T., and M. Golež Kaučič. 'Zoofolkloristics: Imagination as a Critical Component.' Animals 14(6), 928, 2024.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Flourishing Bodies: Spiritual Entanglements and Psychobiological Imperatives.' Religion 53(4), 2023.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Language Matters: Segundo-Ortin & Calvo on Plant Sentience.' Animal Sentience 2023, 465.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Narrating Animals, between Fear and Resilience.' Religions 13(7), 2022.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Like Water in Water: Normativities and Rapid Flows of Change.' Presented at Water Epistemologies: Trans-Cultural and Trans-Species Knowledge, Ethics and Citizenship in Waterscapes, Innsbruck University, June 2021.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals.' Humanimalia 11(2), 2020.
Brooks Pribac, T. ‘Positive sentience is underrated: Commentary on Marino&Merskin on Sheep Complexity.’ Animal Sentience 2019, 22.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Complicated Grief: Commentary on Peña-Guzmán on Animal Suicide.' Animal Sentience 2017, 20(1).
Brooks Pribac, T. ‘Grieving at a distance’, in: Margo DeMello (ed.), Mourning Animals, Michigan State UP 2016.
Brooks Pribac, T. 'Spiritual Animal: A Journey into the Unspeakable.' Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 11(3), 2017, 340-360. [Spanish translation available here.]
Brooks Pribac, T. ‘Someone not Something: Dismantling the Prejudicial Barrier in Knowing Animals (and the Grief which Follows),’ Animal Studies Journal 5(2), 2016, 52-77.
Brooks Pribac, T. ‘Animal Grief’, Animal Studies Journal, 2(2), 2013, 67-90.
Books:
Brooks Pribac, T. Enter the Animal: Cross-Species Persepectives On Grief and Spirituality. Sydney UP 2021.
Guest co-editor of Religion 2023: 53(4) Animal Spirits: Knowing with Otherbodies (animal-themed issue)
Guest co-editor of Southerly Journal 2013: 73(2) Lyre/Liar (animal-themed issue)
Fictocriticism:
Merino, Orpheus P. and Teya Brooks Pribac. ‘The Sheep That I Am’, Southerly 78(1), 2018.
Brooks Pribac, T. ‘Crazy Animaladies,’ audio format + scroll exhibited as part of the art exhibition Animaladies, Interlude Gallery Glebe 11-22 July 2016. Published in Mascara Literary Review 19, 2016.
Brooks Pribac, T. ‘Fishy Feelings’, Southerly Lyre/Liar 73(2), 2013.
