Children’s literature scholar opens her boundaries, builds a community

By Jefferson Beavers, communication specialist, Department of English

If the story of Hope Vang’s academic life so far was told as a children’s fairytale, you could imagine a narrator starting the brightly colored book with a wondrous voiceover introduction:

Hope’s dad? He went to Fresno State.

Hope’s mom? She went to Fresno State.

Hope’s older sister? Hope’s younger sister? They went to Fresno State too!

And each and every one of Hope’s aunts and uncles and cousins? You guessed it! Bulldog U.

“Bulldog born, bulldog bred,” her entire family sang. 

And so what did our heroine decide to do, our dear Hope Vang?

She …

… inserted a plot twist, of course, by leaving the Central Valley to go to college.

After graduating from Mount Whitney High School in Visalia, Vang earned a bachelor’s degree in English and comparative literature from UC Irvine. But then, when she started researching and applying to master’s programs in literature, a funny thing happened.

Back to the narrator—

Question: What was the only school to offer Hope Vang a full financial aid package of scholarships and grants, with no loans, for graduate school?

Answer: Fresno State.

“Financially, coming back home made the most sense,” said Vang, who also considered San Diego State, among other schools. “At first I was like, ‘No! I can’t come back!’ But my sisters always joked about it. They were like, ‘See, there’s a Bulldog in all of us. See, you’re a Bulldog now.’”

Part of Vang’s initial financial support was the 2023 Cheng Lok Chua Scholarship, an award for English Department students who demonstrate significant interest in multiethnic literatures. 

The scholarship is named after a beloved professor emeritus at Fresno State, whose lifetime of critical and scholarly work has profoundly impacted the global field of multiethnic and Asian-American literatures, including multiple generations of readers and writers across communities.

(Recently, in her second year, Vang was also awarded a 2024 Dean’s Council Scholarship from the College of Arts and Humanities.)

“I felt validated. I felt comforted,” Vang said. “I hadn’t even entered the program yet, and the faculty saw the importance of my research work in children’s literature and multiethnic literature. Everyone tells you, coming into grad school, it can be a little lonely. But the Chua Scholarship made me realize my opinions matter, my research matters, someone there will listen.”

While financial support played a big role in luring Vang back home to her family and launching her into her graduate studies at Fresno State, the opportunity to build a new community around her research interests was equally important.

While applying, Vang read an interview with Dr. René Rodríguez-Astacio, a freshly minted Ph.D. who came to the university as an assistant professor in 2021, after studying curriculum and instruction — with a focus on children’s and adolescent literatures — at Penn State.

Rodríguez-Astacio is active in research circles for LGBTQIA+ topics in teacher education, as well as the representation of Latinx and queer communities in young-adult literature. His recent publications include essays and book chapters on teaching Black superheroes in Y.A. lit courses, exploring Spider-Man’s Puerto Rican identity, and using critical race analysis of superhero narratives in DC Graphic Novels.

Vang’s research has focused on Gothic children’s literature with Malaysian representation, as well as mother-daughter relationships in young-adult texts. Her work also employs queer theory to examine adolescent representations in global multimedia, and feminist rhetoric to examine TikTok trends and pop culture — including one critical analysis of the lyrics and visual concepts in the music video “Wife,” from the K-pop girl group (G)I-DLE.

“Hope’s intellectual curiosity and passion for academia feels fresh and exciting,” Rodríguez-Astacio said. “Her pursuits set her apart, as a scholar who weaves her cultural and intellectual understandings and expertise into engaging and meaningful scholarship in the field of English. It is inspiring to see students own their learning, within community, a distinguishing quality that’s so central to Hope’s impressive work. I can’t wait to see the places she’ll go!”

Vang started out thinking she’d go to medical school. But her interest in English and the humanities started to take shape early on as an undergrad at UC Irvine. In particular, the school’s UTeach program, which enables upper-division undergraduates to design, develop, and deliver their own lower-division seminar classes, caught her attention.

The program offered a wide range of student-taught 1-unit classes, on diverse subjects such as the lifespan of an octopus, the science of aging, the Quran, Japanese manga, video games, and more.

She took an English topics course on Star Trek from Dr. Jonathan Alexander, who later became her UTeach mentor. Vang loved how the course integrated the approaches of rhetoric and literary studies with science-fiction, television, and youth culture.

Vang spent her junior year building the pedagogy and designing the curriculum for her own course, Gothic Children’s Literature. The course, which she taught in her senior year, traced the development of the young protagonists in Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novella “Coraline” and Hanna Alkaf’s middle-grade folktale “The Girl and the Ghost.”

“It’s not only like, how do you teach children, or how do children read books. But it’s also, how do they form communities around a specific gender or specific identities like race or socioeconomic class,” Vang said. “I’m trying to look at children’s literature from new lenses.”

Vang became interested in reading at a young age. Among her earliest favorites were the picture book “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” as well as the novel “Charlotte’s Web” and the “Boxcar Children” series.

She said she fell out of love with literature for a while in middle school and high school. For one, she felt like other kids were judging her for reading books with titles like “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” But also, she felt disconnected when so much focus started to be placed on reading the literary classics of “the straight, white men of Europe and America,” she said, books she didn’t feel all that interested in.

“When I went to undergrad, all my fellow freshmen were talking about all these classic books they’ve read, and I had no idea,” Vang said. “I never read most of those. It was like, ‘Great Gatsby,’ I don’t know her! I felt like a fake English major.”

But then … Star Trek, Dr. Alexander, and UTeach. Vang’s boundaries were immediately challenged and her studies quickly opened up. 

Vang tapped into a curiosity she’d had for a long time — she wanted to try and understand what “children’s literature” is, exactly. What makes a book fit into that category, and why?

“Children’s books can often look like they’re not academic enough, because they appear so basic,” Vang said. “But I think they’re really important, because reading children’s literature sets the fundamentals for a bunch of other life experiences. These books connect to a lot of different metaphors and allegories and stories that we all come to know and love.”

Now in her master’s program in literature at Fresno State, Vang has expanded her academic interests by adding new layers of feminism and Internet culture to her studies of children’s literature. She also works for the English Department as a teaching associate, where she teaches full-semester English 5A and 5B courses for the university’s first-year writing program.

Vang currently feels drawn most toward new research topics involving the ways communities form and migrate online. Among her favorite subjects so far: fan culture and fan fiction, zine culture, Tumblr blogs, BookTok, anime, K-pop, the 4B Movement, and more.

“I’ve realized that a lot of people online are so willing to be themselves and they have great things to say, even if they have like, a normal day job,” she said. “A lot of people dismiss something because it’s on the Internet. In terms of academia, it can be hard to validate these experiences and write them in an academic way. So I’m always scrolling and just listening.”

Vang also remembers learning from her peers in undergrad about the importance of getting involved on your campus early and often, and she has seen first-hand how that impacted her trajectory. At Fresno State, she has immersed herself in two student organizations, the Students of English Studies Association (SESA) and the Hmong American Ink and Stories club (HAIS). Both experiences have continued to open doors and create connections for her.

At SESA’s annual symposium, Vang has twice presented her own scholarly research papers and she has volunteered to moderate panels for her peers. She was recently elected as the group’s vice president for 2025-26.

Vang serves as the social media manager for HAIS, running their Instagram and promoting the group’s events with visiting authors. She published her first poem, “My Mother’s River,” in the fourth volume of hais: a literary journal. 

“Staying involved is really helpful,” she said. “A community is really important for me, especially in academia. When you graduate, yes, your diploma has your name on it. But there are people that got you there, and it’s good to give back to the communities that helped you.”

“Now that I’m into my second year of my grad program, I’m still meeting a lot of new faces, and creating new relationships with people. For incoming students, they can see how you’ve done it, and you can help guide them and create this really good ecosystem for future graduate students coming in.”

Vang plans to soon apply for Ph.D. programs, with the goal of becoming an English professor and continuing her research at a university. 

That could make for a storybook ending … and another beginning.