Oral Tradition Volume 10, Number 2October 1995
About the Authors
Robin Waugh
Robin Waugh, Sessional Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, has a teaching and research interest in comparative medieval literatures. His “Competitive Narrators in the Homecoming Scene of Beowulf” is forthcoming in the Journal of Narrative Technique.
Jarold Ramsey
Jarold Ramsey, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, specializes in Native American literature and folklore. Among his publications is Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West (Nebraska, 1983).
Susan Niditch
Susan Niditch is Samuel Green Professor of Religion at Amherst College, where she has taught since 1978. A student of Albert Bates Lord and Frank Moore Cross, she explores ways in which the study of early and oral literatures deepens appreciation for ancient Israelite culture. Her most recent book is Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (1996).
John H. McDowell
John H. McDowell, Professor of Folklore at Indiana University, has carried on extensive fieldwork among southern Native American peoples. His major books include Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians (Kentucky, 1989) and “So Wise Were Our Elders”: Mythic Narratives of the Kamsá (Kentucky, 1994).
E.A. Mackay
Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of Natal-Durban, E. A. Mackay specializes in the relationship between the verbal and the plastic arts in ancient Greece. Two of her articles are “Methodology in Vase-Profile Analysis,” in Occasional Papers on Antiquities, III (J. Paul Getty Museum, 1985), and “The Oral Shaping of Culture,” in Scholia: Natal Studies in Classical Antiquity (1993).
Betsy Bowden
Betsy Bowden teaches medieval literature and folklore at Rutgers University. Her books include Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan (Indiana, 1982; rpt. forthcoming); Chaucer Aloud: The Varieties of Textual Interpretation (Pennsylvania, 1987); Listeners’ Guide to Medieval English: A Discography (Garland, 1988); and Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales (Boydell & Brewer, 1991). Her articles have appeared in Medievalia et Humanistica, Harvard Library Bulletin, Translation and Literature, Literature in Performance, Journal of American Folklore, and other periodicals.
Werner H. Kelber
Werner H. Kelber is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Rice University. His work has focused on oral tradition, gospel narrativity, biblical hermeneutics, the historical Jesus, orality-scribality studies, memory, rhetoric, text criticism, and the media history of the Bible. His major work, The Oral and the Written Gospel (1997), examines points and processes of oral-scribal transition in the early Jewish-Christian tradition.
Jesse Byock
Professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Jesse L. Byock has published a number of books, among them Feud in the Icelandic Saga (California, 1984) and a translation, The Saga of the Volsungs (California, 1990).
