Animals as food are a major subject of academic interest, Dr. Gruen said, adding, “Given that the way most people interact with animals is when they’re dead and eaten, that becomes a big question.”

The animals humans live with and love are also a major subject.

Another strain of philosophy, exemplified by the French writer Jacques Derrida, has had an equally strong influence. He considered the way we think of animals, and why we distance ourselves from them. His writing is almost impossible to capture in a quotation, since it constantly circles around on itself, building intensity as he toys with the very language he is using to write about what he is trying to understand. His approach has been adapted in a lot of academic work.

In “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” for example, he discusses at length not only what he thinks of his cat, but what his cat thinks of him. In a fairly simple sentence — and thought — for him, he writes about his cat: “An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?”

What animals think — in fact, what animals have to say — is something scholars now take quite seriously, recognizing of course that there are limits to that approach. As Dr. Weil of Wesleyan said, referring to the gulf between animals and previous outsiders (“others”), like women or African-Americans, “Unlike the other others, these others can’t speak back or write back in language that the academy recognizes.”

The academy does, it seems, recognize and understand Derrida and, sometimes, follow in his word tracks. Consider, for instance, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming? The Case of Becoming-Plant” in a recent issue of The Journal for Critical Animal Studies. Other writing is quite approachable. The moral arguments about eating animals are clear. And there are studies that any urban dweller could profit from, like “How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals.”

The great variety of subjects, methods, interests and assumptions in animal studies does raise questions about how it holds together. Law schools, for instance, routinely have courses in animals and the law. Veterinary schools have courses about the human connection to animals. Some people group courses in how to use animals in therapy as part of animal studies.

None of this variety diminishes the energy or importance of what is going on, but at least some people who work on subjects that would be included under the animal studies rubric, like Dr. Jamieson at N.Y.U. and Dr. Desmond at Illinois, think the scholarly ferment has a way to go before it can clearly see itself as an academic field.

Dr. Desmond says it is “not yet a field.” It is, she says, “an emergent scholarly community.” One thing it does not lack is energy.