Gabriela Jarzębowska, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, where she co-develops and teaches in the first anthrozoology degree program in Central and Eastern Europe. She holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies (2020) from the University of Warsaw, where her doctoral research examined the cultural and political dimensions of rat control in post-war Poland. Trained originally in art history, she also completed postgraduate studies in agriculture at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW) in 2023. This rare combination of expertise allows her to work across the humanities, social sciences, and agricultural knowledge, with a particular focus on human-animal relations, environmental discourse, and critical theory.

Her research lies at the intersection of environmental humanities, critical animal studies, cultural history, and the history of agricultural modernization. She is the author of Species Cleansing: The Cultural Practice of Rat Control (V&R / BRILL, 2024), which develops the concept of “species cleansing” as a framework for analyzing culturally legitimized violence against animals. Her current NCN Sonata-funded project, Farms, Animals and Meat Culture in Poland, explores livestock intensification and changing interspecies relations in socialist Poland. Her work has been recognized with the Fulbright Award, NCN Preludium and Sonata grants, the Inka Brodzka-Wald Award, and the Polish Minister of Science Award for Outstanding Young Academics.