Claudia Hirtenfelder

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Animal Geographer and Podcaster

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Join date: Dec 18, 2024

About

Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder is an animal studies scholar and podcaster. She has a PhD in geography from Queen’s University Canada and is interested in the urban animal histories and futures. Claudia is also the founder and host of The Animal Turn and Animal Highlight podcasts. She is currently an external lecturer in Change Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

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Posts (7)

Apr 28, 2026 ∙ 3 min

Domesticated Animals in Sanctuaries of Refugees Fleeing Violence

Sona Kalafusova and Zipporah Weisberg present a lecture as part of the 2026 VAS Summer Lecture Series. On the 9th of April 2026, Zipporah Weisberg and Sona Kalafusova presented a lecture as part of the Vienna Animal Studies summer lecture series, with the aim to explore how animals in sanctuaries are legally defined and what opportunities exist for enhancing their status and protections. They started with a provocative story, a story about pigs at the Progetto Cuori Liberi (Free Hearts...

Oct 29, 2025 ∙ 3 min

Virtual Encounters of Another Kind

Dr. Judith Benz-Schwarzburg gives a lecture on virtual animals at the Immersium in Vienna (Photo Credit: Oliver Hirtenfelder) On the 8th of October 2025 the Vienna Animal Studies group hosted its largest lecture yet. Held within the impressive in Immersium in Vienna Dr. Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, a Senior Researcher in Animal Ethics and Animal Cognition at the Messerli Research Institute, talked to us about the ethics of digitally representing animals. The event started with an opportunity to...

Jul 2, 2025 ∙ 7 min

Thinking about Bats in Vienna

Konstantin Deininger, Katharina Leibezeder, and I were recently interviewed by Mara-Daria Cojocaru about our contribution to the project "Philosophy in the Wild. Finding Hope in Mixed Communities," a project that between April 2025 and April 2026 will collect fieldnotes and multispecies poetry in an anthrozoological vasculum that represents Mary Midgley’s biscuit tin

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