Jan was a dissertation fellow at the Center in Santa Barbara in 2017/18. As a Fellow, he completed and defended his dissertation and earned a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research. Jan is a political economist whose research focuses on the relationship between corporate capitalism, political power, and public debates about ethics and values. His current book project traces how the American meat industry seeks to produce an animal that best suits market conditions – as biological animal, financial security, object of social imagination, and subject of political contestation – from conception through consumption. This work sheds light on the tensions and interrelations between market valuation, the value of life itself, and social values in the late-liberal, not-quite-post-industrial United States. Jan’s research has been supported by a Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), an Ira Katznelson Dissertation Fellowship from the New School for Social Research, a Human-Animal Studies Fellowship at Wesleyan University, and a Graduate Student Fellowship at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.