Barbara J. King PhD » Team

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist and freelance science writer and public speaker.

Barbara focuses on animal emotion and cognition, and the ethics of human relationships with other animals. She has conducted observational research on learning strategies by infant baboons in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, and has filmed and analyzed gestural interactions among family groups of gorillas and bonobos held in captivity. She is the author of seven books, including most recently Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and the Wild, and currently is writing a book about living ethically with cats.

Barbara’s book How Animals Grieve has been translated into 7 languages and her TED talk on animal love and grief has now received over 3.5 million views. Barbara’s shorter-form writing, illuminating the expressions of thinking and feeling by a wide variety of animals and contesting human exceptionalism, has appeared at NPR, Scientific American, Aeon, Psyche, Undark, and Anthropology News. She regularly reviews science books for NPR, Science Magazine and the TLS in London.

In addition to writing for the public, Barbara writes and edits scholarly publications. For the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, for instance, she co-authored with colleagues “Towards an anti-maleficent research agenda” outlining the harms of experimental research, and of captivity itself, on animals’ lives. She is the science acquisitions editor for the book series Animal Lives at University of Chicago Press.

Barbara earned her doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, US. For 28 years, she taught biological anthropology and primate behavior courses at William & Mary, in Virginia, USA. Now working from home alongside her husband and rescued cats, she enjoys amateur nature photography and documents moments in animals’ lives in locations ranging from US national and state parks to her own yard.