Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Pablo a Marca is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Italian Studies. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Posthuman Fairy Tales: Recuperating European Folklore in the Age of the Anthropocene.” It focuses on the interconnections between European folklore, particularly fairy tales, and recent theorizations of posthumanism. The project seeks to develop a new methodology to study fairy tales to advance both the fields of folkloristics and posthumanism. Starting from three of the main topics that constitute posthumanist theory, namely, the relations between humans and animals, the environment, and inanimate objects, the project demonstrates that such themes were already textualized in European fairy tales before the advent of such theories. In reading the texts from a 21st-century perspective, he seeks to recuperate fairy tales to address contemporary injustices related to the human and the non-human world. The goal is to derive an ethics and praxis from the texts that are not based on hierarchies and can be applied to contemporary societies.