Kari  Weil is University Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University. She earned her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Princeton University with specializations in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century France and Feminist Theory.  She has published widely on literary representations of gender, French feminism and, more recently, on theories and representations of animal otherness.  She is also the author of  Thinking Animals:  Why Animal Studies Now ( Columbia UP, 2012) and Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia, 1992) .  Her current project is tentatively titled,  ‘The Most Beautiful Conquest of Man’ (sic): Horses, Gender and the Conquest of Animal Nature in Nineteenth-Century France.