The CFST Welcomes Katie Gillespie, PhD, as Associate Director
The Center for Food Systems Transformation welcomes new Associate Director Katie Gillespie, PhD. Dr. Gillespie will be working with Director Aaron Gross, PhD, to advance scholarship on issues of justice and ethics related to the food system and its role in climate change, as well as contributing to campus efforts to transform institutional food practices to align more closely with the university’s ethical and justice-focused values.
“I’m thrilled to be joining USD and working to grow conversations and collaborations in food systems transformation at the university,” she shared. As part of her role, she will also be organizing events, facilitating research collaborations and supporting the growth of the Food Studies program on campus.
Dr. Gillespie graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a bachelor’s in creative writing. She received a master’s and PhD in geography from the University of Washington. Her research, teaching and publishing has focused on food and agricultural systems, human-animal relationships and environmental studies.
Prior to joining USD, she contributed to developing a new online master’s program in Applied Environmental and Sustainability Studies at the University of Kentucky. Previously, she held positions at Wesleyan University and the University of Washington, teaching on themes of food systems, animal studies, feminist studies, environmental justice and qualitative methods.
“Dr. Gillespie’s training in geography, creative writing, qualitative research methods and especially her prominent contributions to multispecies ethnography, make her uniquely qualified to understand the dynamics of modern food systems and help shape CFST’s research agenda,” said Dr. Gross.
Dr. Gillespie is the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389, published in 2018 by University of Chicago Press, based on multispecies ethnographic fieldwork on the lives of cows in the dairy industry in the United States.
She has also published on human-animal relations, food systems, feminist geographies, political economy and multispecies methods in numerous scholarly journals, such as Antipode, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment & Planning E, Gender, Place & Culture, Animal Studies Journal, Politics & Animals and Hypatia.
She is co-editor of several edited volumes: Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections & Hierarchies, Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death and Vulnerable Witness: The Politics of Grief in the Field.
Her forthcoming book, The Sound of Feathers: Practicing Attentiveness in Multispecies Worlds, will be published in early 2026 by Duke University Press. This monograph takes a multispecies autoethnographic approach to understanding the foundational dynamics and histories of harm behind everyday human-animal encounters and offers a pathway to imagine futures of flourishing. You can learn more about her work on her website.
Dr. Gillespie’s passion for imagining and building more just food systems and her experience in program development, research, teaching and writing will be invaluable in growing the reach, scope and activities of the Center for Food Systems Transformation.
“Perhaps above all she has a unique ability to draw out the ethical and existential issues that lie behind our seemingly mundane food choices and to inspire the changemaking spirit that is foundational to USD’s educational mission,” shared Dr. Gross.