Kymberley Chu

Bio/Description
Kymberley Chu

Kymberley Chu is broadly interested in research areas such as animal geographies, anthropology of capitalism, critical animal studies, debt, feminist/queer STS, and multispecies entanglements. For now, her doctoral research looks at how scientific and farmed animals are commodified in political economy. By tracing zoonoses geographically adjacent and within Malaysian plantation worlds, she would like to follow the life cycle of long-tailed macaques and domesticated pigs who are usually villainized as “colonial pests”. Liveliness as an economic value altered by zoonotic outbreaks challenges us to rethink the cultural assumptions we have about global health and how we cultivate our cultural sense of belonging in relation to the nonhuman “other”. Kymberley's previous journalistic reportage focused on environmental histories of dispossession in Malaysia for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology & International Relations at the University of California, Davis. At Princeton, she hopes to write more on animal histories of capitalism and colonialism.