Hector Tapia III

I earned both my B.A and M.A from California State University, Fresno. After earning my degrees, I have developed and taught courses in multiple expository writing formats, in myth and folklore, and in world and U.S. literatures at both California State University, Fresno and Reedley College. My literary interests span the various incarnations of “beast literature” of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, Africa, India, and Mesoamerica. I am also interested in proverbs and how they reflect the socio-cultural ethos of each respective society and how they inject concealed meaning into the literature they are woven into. My scholarship examines the human-animal divide and questions the ways in which authors have (ab)used non-human animals to serve as a backdrop to explore our moral values and identity struggles. I examine what it means to "voice" an animal and how this procedure has very different meanings based on whether the larger cultural context has a rigid hierarchical divide between humans and animals, as in Greece and Rome, and in the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, as opposed to cultural traditions that do not have that same divide. My doctoral project seeks to examine the animal fable on a global scale and explore questions relating to the uses of animal bodies in colonization, figurations of indigeneity, and delineations of queerness.

Languages:

• English
• Greek
• Latin
• Spanish