About

Stephen Lochetto

I'm a herpetologist and a folklorist, and I study animals as both biological and cultural subjects.

As a reptile biologist I work on systematics — reconstructing how living groups are related — with a focus on the African plated lizards of the genus Gerrhosaurus; my master's thesis at Villanova reconstructed their relationships from morphology, and it has since been cited in the broader literature on southern African reptile phylogenetics. I've also studied tail regeneration in geckos and I review the science of reptile welfare. I hold a B.S. from the University of Miami (1998) and an M.S. from Villanova (2002), and I'm Associate Professor of Biology at Delaware County Community College.

Coming to folklore from that biology background — a "biological humanities" approach — I study human–animal interaction: how raising and showing animals at 4-H projects and county fairs passes culture between people and across generations (an ethnography that received the American Folklore Society's W. W. Newell Prize), how keepers of reptiles turn a hobby into a way of life, and what the legends people tell about animals — car-sized catfish, snakes dropped from planes — reveal about us. That work is the subject of my doctoral dissertation in American Studies at Penn State Harrisburg, American Encounters with Reptiles. I grew up in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, have done fieldwork in Africa and on Guam, and I use faunalore — fauna + lore — for the single question under all of it: how animals and people make sense of each other.

The two threads of my work are the research and the faunalore; the complete record lives in publications and the CV.