Oral Tradition Volume 15, Number 1March 2000
About the Authors
Joseph Harris
Joseph Harris is Professor in the English Department and the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. Among his many publications are articles on “Beowulf’s Name,” “Beowulf as Epic,” and “Gender and Genre: Short and Long Forms of the Saga Literature.” His forthcoming and in-progress work addresses Norse mythology, religion, and related poetry; ballads and issues of performance; and Beowulf.
John Lindow
John Lindow is Professor in the Department of Scandinavian at the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on medieval Scandinavian culture and literature, especially mythology, and on the folklore of the North. His most recent book was Murder and Vengeance Among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology (Folklore Fellows Communications, 262; 1997).
Ülo Valk
Ülo Valk is Professor of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu. During 2003-04 he is a Fulbright scholar at the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include genre theory, demonology, and belief. His most recent book is The Black Gentleman: Manifestations of the Devil in Estonian Folk Religion (2001).
Thomas A. DuBois
Thomas A. DuBois is Professor of Scandinavian studies and folklore at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his most recent books are Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe (2006), Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia (2008), and An Introduction to Shamanism (2009).
Barry B. Powell
Barry B. Powell is Bascom-Halls Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where he teaches Greek poetry, the history of writing, egyptology, and mythology. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Classical Myth, now in its third edition, and Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (1991). He co-edited A New Companion to Homer (1997) with Ian Morris.
Andrew Wiget
Associate Professor of English and Director of The New Mexico Heritage Center at New Mexico State University, Andrew Wiget is also the editor of The Dictionary of Native American Literature (1994) and the author of Native American Literature (1985). His fieldwork focuses on Indian communities in Quebec and in the Southwest, most extensively at Zuni. He is currently working with indigenous people in Western Siberia.
Antonio Scuderi
Antonio Scuderi is Associate Professor of Italian at Truman State University. His research has focused on Nobel playwright Dario Fo's use of popular and oral performance traditions. Scuderi is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (1998) and coeditor of Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition (2000). His most recent articles on Fo have appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Language Review, and New Theatre Quarterly.
Chiji Akoma
Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, Chiji Akoma conducts research in African and African Diasporic folkloric traditions. His work, including poems, has appeared in Research in African Literatures and World Literature Written in English. His essay on Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease is forthcoming in Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (Africa World Press).
Matthew Simpson
Matthew Simpson recently completed his Ph.D. thesis on Scottish university culture in the eighteenth century. He is currently making a study of the poet Robert Fergusson and teaching at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
