PROFESSIONAL BIO
Scholar, author, and editor Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D. (1998 New York University) is Professor Emeritus of English and Interdisciplinary Studies (1998-2023) and founder and senior developer of The Evolutionary Studies Collaborative at St. Francis College, N.Y. He was also the founder and organizer of a number of Darwin-inspired Moral Sense Colloquia and other multidisciplinary events. His new book is Forest Sovereignty: Wildlife Sustainability and Ethics (Oxford: Peter Lang 2025). Other books include: The Vegan Evolution: Transforming Diets and Agriculture (London: Routledge 2022); An Ape Ethic and the Question of Personhood (Lanham: Lexington Books 2020); Art and Adaptability: Consciousness and Cognitive Culture (Leiden: Brill 2018); Evolution and Human Culture (Leiden: Brill 2016); and Making Mind: Moral Sense and Consciousness in Philosophy, Science, and Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2014). Tague’s published work spans a number of disciplines; current interests hover around environmental and animal ethics. Tague has also written or edited nine other academic books or literary anthologies, including Character and Consciousness (2005), Origins of English Dramatic Modernism (2010), and Puzzles of Faith and Patterns of Doubt (2013). Tague has many short-form publications, is the founding editor of the ASEBL website, and is general editor of the Bibliotekos literary site and Literary Veganism: An Online Journal.
In terms of service, Tague has taught over 30 different courses, including some of his own design related to evolutionary studies, and has mentored a range of topics for senior projects. He also has a distinguished record of involvement in the college community. He’s worked on no fewer than 13 standing or ad hoc committees, sometimes as chair, prominent ones including Academic Standards, Curriculum, Promotion and Tenure, Faculty Development, Faculty Evaluation and Enrichment, and the Faculty Coordinating Committee. He served on the Honors Council and was an active member on several Middle States accrediting committees, in particular once chairing the committee on Faculty. As a replacement, he also served at the Academic Dean’s request on the Planning Council and was chair of the English department for three semesters.
Though too numerous to list, Tague initiated and organized many student-centered and other campus events related to small press authors and other artistic, creative, or scholarly people. He was honored to have re-established Sigma Tau Delta – Delta Omicron Chapter, the international English honors society, and to have served as the faculty sponsor. He also sponsored the English Club and what was the student-run literary magazine Montage. A notable event close to Tague’s line of analysis was the Moral Sense Colloquium, which he began in 2012. In June of 2017 the keynote speaker at the Moral Sense Colloquium was the legendary biologist Robert Trivers, and at another colloquium the prominent animal behavior psychologist Diana Reiss was featured. Also noteworthy, Tague co-organized with Dr. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (now Emeritus, University of Lincoln, UK) a 3-day Sixth International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts which gathered over 70 scholars from 24 countries. Exploring the arts and humanities in light of evolution, Tague initiated The Evolutionary Studies Collaborative in 2012. As a service component to the Evolutionary Studies Collaborative, and working with Dr. Gary L. Shapiro, founder and president of the Orang Utan Republik Foundation, Tague led a successful effort to raise scholarship money to send a deserving Indonesian student to college to study biology or forestry. Additionally, partnering with English Professor and Fulbright Scholar Dr. Virginia Franklin, Tague was instrumental in bringing South African Shakespearean actor Vaneshran Arumugan to the college as the first Fulbright Scholar in Residence for the Spring 2013 semester. Vaneshran returned, with actor Emmanuel Castis, in September 2019 to participate and perform in the Moral Sense Colloquium IV. Tague himself has participated in many academic conferences and has been privileged to present papers twice, and to be part of a three-day working group once, at the prestigious Modern Language Association annual convention.
As an editor, Tague was the founder and editor of the ASEBL Journal, whose objective is to publish online peer-reviewed papers on the convergence of ethics, arts, and evolution. ASEBL has consistently blended interdisciplinary approaches: competitive altruism in Beowulf (v. 9, January 2013); cultural traditions from an anthropological perspective in Romeo and Juliet (v. 11.1, January 2015); art and evolution (v. 11.2, April 2015); the cultural evolution of attitudes about homosexuality (v. 12, February 2016); morality and biology (v. 13, January 2018); and great ape personhood (v. 14, January 2019). The final regular issue of ASEBL Journal (v. 15) was devoted to the subject of consciousness with a host of contributors. The ASEBL site will continue as Animal Studies Ethical Behavior Literacy. Tague edits the Bibliotekos literary website, which features profiles on, and some original writing from, authors all over the world. He’s also established Literary Veganism: An Online Journal of writing by, for, and about vegans. Through his efforts with all of these editorial projects, to date Tague has shepherded over 525 academics, poets, writers, reviewers, etc. to print or online publication and consistently involved student editorial interns in these projects.
PERSONAL NARRATIVE
I was born during a snowstorm in February, 1957, at Bay Ridge Hospital, Brooklyn. Except for some time living in Astoria, Queens, and then Hicksville, Long Island, I’ve lived my whole life in Bay Ridge. Upon "retirement" (more of a transition) I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was one of four children. My mother, Frances, was born in 1926, was briefly in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, but successfully graduated high school. As a child, her dog companion was named Jeepers. Her mother, Catherine, emigrated from County Down, Ireland to the U.S. She traveled alone and came to America as a domestic servant when she was only 17 years old. The history of my hardy and independent maternal grandmother has been a positive influence on me. Mom’s dad was born in the U.S., but his people came from Naples, Italy. Mom met and married my father, Joseph, when they were both 17. While his parents were born in the U.S., his maternal grandparents emigrated from Hamburg, Germany. At the age of 17 my father joined the Navy to fight in World War II and never finished high school (though many years later he earned a GED). They were loving parents who supplied us with all the enrichment we needed. Mom was fun-loving and a bit of a prankster. My father had an impoverished and challenging childhood; his father moved the family around often to escape creditors and eventually abandoned them to start a new life with another woman in New Jersey. Dad was handy and did a lot of work around the house. As practical people who suffered deprivation through the Great Depression, neither of my parents ever wasted any food or material items, and from them I learned the virtues of thrift, self-control, and tolerance. They were also deeply religious and two of the most honest people I’ve ever known. I don’t recall many books in our small, crowded house, and other than a Catholic Catechism and his Jerusalem bible, the latter of which I now possess, I don’t recall seeing my father read much. My mother would read crime stories from time to time.
I was lucky though, since my parents had a subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a top literary and cultural magazine. No one but I devoured each issue, and I’m sure the writing and themes of that publication had an effect on my becoming an academic and writer. Only one of my siblings completed a four-year undergraduate degree (in fine arts), and another had dropped out of high school. As children, along with our cousins, we spent months at a time upstate in a house on a rural road in Holmes, New York. The dwelling had only running cold water, electricity, and a propane gas stove. There was no hot water, shower, or telephone. No doubt these early, rugged experiences were a shaping influence on my thinking about and behavior toward nature. During the 1960s that part of rural N.Y. was sparsely populated, and we roamed the hills and countryside in search of adventure and trouble. After I turned 17 and started dating, my summer excursions to the country ceased, but I do recall, during my last summer there in 1974, reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a work that had a tremendous power on my imagination by virtue of its themes, writing, and philosophical examination of the natural world. Occasionally, I still return to this book for mental and spiritual refreshment.
As a NYC sanitation man, my father did not make much money, but in the 1960s-1970s it was, apparently, enough to raise a family of four. We went to Catholic schools, and I was sent to St. Francis Preparatory school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I graduated in three years, but don’t have fond memories of high school. I must say, though, that I was privileged to be taught by intelligent and caring Franciscan Brothers from grades 6-11. It was an awful commute during dangerous times, since I had to take two trains into Union Square, Fourteenth Street, Manhattan, and then one train back to Brooklyn, each way every day. Upon graduation I went to Queens College, CUNY, to study earth and environmental science. At the time, 1974, that was the only city college to offer this program, and from Bay Ridge the commute way past Flushing was very long and arduous and involved a number of trains and a bus. At Queens, I soon opted out of chemistry and gravitated to English and American literature, a very fine department there at that time. I particularly remember Robert A. Greenberg, though he was not the only professor to have an impact on me. My parents were unaware of my plans regarding environmental science and then literature, what I refer to as benign indifference. Perhaps because I was the second boy, with two girls after me, I was pretty much left to my own devices.
After two years at Queens I could no longer handle the commute and transferred to Brooklyn College, from which I graduated with a B.A. dated February 1979. Nevertheless, during the Fall semester of 1978 I was working full-time for corporate lawyers by day and finishing my degree at night. Little did I realize that would be the pattern for the next twenty years on and off: working full-time during the day and attending classes at night, completing an M.A., an M.Phil., and then a Ph.D. In fact, for many years after the M.A., completed at night after the demanding day job, I’d teach as an adjunct early in the morning, go to my tiring law firm job as a manager of information services, and then attend graduate school in the evenings. While working nearly twenty years for corporate lawyers from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, I simultaneously cultivated my academic career by teaching exclusively at St. Francis College, so perhaps it’s not surprising they hired me full-time when a tenure-track position opened.
My primary interest was in the English novel and the creation and behavior of characters. I began to focus on the subjects of character, individual consciousness, and moral behavior, mostly from a philosophical perspective. My dissertation advisor, Frederick R. Karl, introduced me to the intricacies of authors like George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence. A philosopher who shaped my thinking was the early nineteenth-century German Arthur Schopenhauer, especially his notion of fixed character, which lay beneath a more empirical, malleable character. Ahead of developmental psychology and neuroscience, he also intuited that perception is a product of individual understanding even more than raw sensation. Over time as I read in the biological and social sciences, I would come to appreciate his ideas in terms of genes, temperament, and cultural influences. As one might imagine, I read as much and as widely as I could, but I mistakenly limited myself, in these early post-graduate years, to philosophy and literature.
A major change in my thinking came when I began reading in the natural sciences and especially Darwin’s work, which led me into areas from evolutionary and consciousness studies to biological anthropology. As a young man I was a science geek with microscopes and telescopes who reared himself on books like Microbe Hunters, The Lives of a Cell, and authors like George Gamow. As a child growing up in the 1960s, I was a product of the NASA generation. Although I started college as a science student, with no safety net to help me recover, I moved into writing and literary studies, my strengths in high school. Nevertheless, in recent years I’ve studied the many components of biological, primate, and human evolution to illuminate my core interest in the subjects of character, consciousness, and moral behavior. Perhaps I needed grounding in philosophy and literature to come full circle. I’ve come to realize how our hominin past, as well as continuities with nonhuman primates with whom we share a common ancestor, can help us understand some of our current behaviors. Recently, in some ways capitalizing from my evolutionary studies, my focus tends to veer toward animal and environmental ethics.