Oral Tradition Volume 13, Number 2October 1998

About the Authors

Craig R. Davis

Associate Professor of English Language and Literature, Craig Davis teaches Old English and Old Norse at Smith College. He has written on royal genealogies, the Arthurian legend, and Old English poetry.

Ingrid Holmberg

Assistant Professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, Ingrid Holmberg researches cunning intelligence and gender in Homeric poetry and in Apollonius Rhodius. She also writes about Sappho’s poetics and Hephaistos in the Odyssey.

Yang Enhong

Yang Enhong currently serves as Senior Researcher and Director of the Division of Tibetan Literature at the Institute of Ethnic Literature, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. She has closely studied performances by singers of the epic Gesar and published many articles in this field. She is the author of Investigations and Research into Singers of the Epic Gesar (1995) and Gesar: A Heroic Epic from Chinese Ethnic Minority Traditions (1990).

Yvonne Banning

Yvonne Banning studied acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, as well as at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa. She performed in theater, film, radio, and television in England and South Africa before joining the Drama department at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Deborah VanderBilt

Deborah VanderBilt is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. Her research interests include oral influences on Anglo-Saxon prose works. She has published on Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and its Old English translation.

Bruce Lionel Mason

Bruce Mason is completing his Ph.D. with a methodological analysis of “virtual ethnography” at the Department of Folklore, Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is currently employed at the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences as a research associate in Hypermedia Ethnography.

Mark Bender

Mark Bender is an associate professor of Chinese literature and folklore at The Ohio State University. He has published on Suzhou professional storytelling (Suzhou pingtan) and the oral and written literatures of several Chinese minority cultures, such as the Yi, Miao (Hmong), and Daur. His books include Plum and Bamboo: China’s Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (2003), Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou Province, China (2006), and The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, co-edited with Victor Mair (2011).

Sabine Habermalz

Sabine Habermalz works as an administrative coordinator with the Academic Year in Freiburg program. She has studied English literature in both Germany and the United States, obtaining her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and her Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg.

Susan J. Rasmussen

Susan Rasmussen, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston, studies religion and symbolism, gender, culture theory, ethnographic analysis, and African humanities. She has conducted field research among the Tuareg people of the Niger Republic.