Oral Tradition Volume 18, Number 1March 2003
About the Authors
Note: This listing includes each author’s most recently received biography and may not coincide with the article publication date.
View “About the Authors” as published
Pertti Anttonen
Pertti Anttonen, Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1993), works as a Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland, which is affiliated with the Institute for Cultural Research at the University of Helsinki. He is currently finishing two books: one on the concepts of tradition and modernity, the other on oral tradition, modernity, and Finnish national heritage.
Daniel Avorgbedor
Daniel Avorgbedor is Associate Professor in the School of Music and in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. His major research areas include urban ethnomusicology, continuities in the African Diaspora, musical traditions in contemporary African churches, and crosscultural aesthetics. He has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Oral Tradition, World of Music, Cahiers de musiques traditionnelles, and others.
Egbert J. Bakker
Egbert J. Bakker is Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. His main interests are oral tradition, pragmatics, and narratology in ancient Greek literature. His books include Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (1997) and the Brill Companion to Herodotus (co-ed., 2002).
Michael Barnes
Michael Barnes is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston. His research interests include the Greek epic tradition and Hellenistic poetry. His dissertation, “Inscribed kleos: Aetiological Contexts in Apollonius of Rhodes,” focuses on the intersections of aetiology, poetic tradition, and contemporary sociopoetics in the Argonautica.
Felice Belle
Felice Belle is a poet, playwright, and the former curator/host of the Friday Night Slam at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City. Her work has been published in Roots and Culture, SLAM, Drumvoices Revue, Longshot, and Def Jam’s Bum Rush the Page (2001). She currently works as the director of Youth Speaks, New York City.
David Bouvier
David Bouvier teaches Greek language and literature at the University of Lausanne and is a member of the Centre Louis Gernet, Paris. He works on Homeric poetry and intellectual relations in ancient Greece. His most recent book is Le Sceptre et la lyre: L’Iliade ou les héros de la mémoire (2002).
Lina Bugiene
Lina Bugiene serves as a scientific researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius. Her Ph.D. thesis, “Mythical Images of Water in Lithuanian Legends and Folk-Beliefs,” was subsequently published in the “Folklore Studies” series (1999). Her current interests include different genres of folk narrative, folk beliefs, and popular religion.
Casey Dué
Casey Dué is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston and Executive Editor for Publications at the Center for Hellenic Studies. Among her interests are ancient Greek oral traditions, Homeric poetry, Greek tragedy, and textual criticism. Recent publications include Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis (2002).
Mark W. Edwards
Mark W. Edwards is Emeritus Professor of Classics at Stanford University. His main research interest is ancient Greek epic, and he is the author of several books on Homer, including Homer: Poet of the Iliad (1987) and volume 5 of the Cambridge University Press commentary on the Iliad (1993).
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).
Elizabeth C. Fine
Professor Elizabeth C. Fine is Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Tech. Among her books are The Folklore Text (1984) and Soulstepping: African American Step Shows (2003).
Margalit Finkelberg
Margalit Finkelberg is Professor and Chair of Classics at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998) and co-editor of Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (2003). Her book entitled Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition will be published in 2005.
Ruth Finnegan
Born in Northern Ireland in 1933, Ruth Finnegan studied classics at Oxford, followed by social anthropology, then fieldwork and university teaching in Africa. In 1969 she joined the Open University where she is now Emeritus Professor. Her books include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977/1992), Literacy and Orality (1988), Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (1992), South Pacific Oral Traditions (joint ed., 1995), Communicating (2002), and The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (2007).
H.C. Groenewald
H. C. Groenewald is a senior lecturer in the Department of African Languages at the University of Johannesburg (formerly Rand Afrikaans University). His research interests include performance and Zulu drama. His recent publications include an article on Ndebele praise poetry in Oral Tradition and a study of Zulu theatre in the South African Theatre Journal.
Thomas A. Hale
Thomas A. Hale holds the Liberal Arts Professorship in African, French, and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. He studies West African epic and griots, both of which are addressed in his Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (1998).
Joel M. Halpern
Among the most recent publications of Joel M. Halpern, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology (1992), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective (1986) with Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern and The Far East Comes Near: Autobiographical Accounts of Southeast Asian Students in America (co-ed., 1989).
Lee Haring
Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His research in island folklore of the Indian Ocean has appeared in Verbal Arts in Madagascar: Performance in Historical Perspective (1992), numerous journal articles, and a collection of translations entitled Indian Ocean Folktales (2002).
Yamashita Hiroaki
Yamashita Hiroaki, Professor Emeritus from Nagoya University and currently Professor at Aichi Shukutoku University, has published several annotated editions of the Tale of the Heike, most recently the Shin Nihon bukgaku taikei Heike. He has authored and edited numerous volumes on the Heike and other war tales, including Ikusa monogatari to Genji shôgun (War Tales and the Minamoto shôgun) (2003).
Richard A. Horsley
Richard A. Horsley, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is author of many books, including “Whoever Hears You Hears Me”: Prophets, Performance, and Tradition in Q (with Jonathan Draper, 1999), Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel (2001), and Jesus in Context: Power, People, Performance (2008), and has edited many others, including Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark (with Jonathan Draper and John Miles Foley, 2006).
Bonnie D. Irwin
Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Eastern Illinois University, Bonnie D. Irwin has published scholarly and pedagogical essays on the subject of frame tales. She is currently working on an edited volume about teaching the 1001 Nights.
Martin S. Jaffee
Martin S. Jaffee is Professor of Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His most recent work on oral tradition appears in Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE – 400 CE (2001).
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.
Anne Klein
Professor of Asian Religions at Rice University, Anne Klein researches Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice as well as comparative and crosscultural work on women and Buddhism. The second edition of her Knowledge and Liberation: Tibetan Buddhist Epistemology (1986) was published in 1999.
Peace B. Lee
Peace B. Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. Her research focuses upon the cultures and oral traditions of ethnic minorities in northeast China. Her transcription and translation of “Seongju puri” is included in the forthcoming Reader in Folk and Popular Literature in China.
Richard Martin
Richard P. Martin is the Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics at Stanford University. His interests include early Greek poetry (especially Homer), Greek myth and religion, modern Greek studies, medieval Irish literature, and ethnopoetics. His latest book, Rhapsoidia, will appear in 2004.
Catharine Mason
Catharine Mason is Associate Professor of English at the Université de Caen—Basse Normandie, France. Combining studies in literature, linguistics, and anthropology, her work focuses on oral poetry and song. Specialist of Victoria Howard, Chinookan poet and informant to Melville Jacobs in 1929-30, Mason is especially interested in poetics as a social and cultural phenomenon. Her papers and publications include works on Native American myths, Southern American English, ethnopoetic methodologies and Bob Dylan’s poetic achievement. She teaches classes on English as a world language and medium for cultural expression as well as seminars on language, music studies, and ethnopoetics.
Thomas A. McKean
Thomas A. McKean, a Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, specializes in the Scots and Gaelic song traditions of Scotland. His publications include Hebridean Song-Maker: Iain Macneacail of the Isle of Skye (1997) and articles on various aspects of Scottish tradition.
Gregory Nagy
Gregory Nagy is the author of The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, Homer the Preclassic, and The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. With Stephen A. Mitchell, he co-authored a new introduction to and co-edited the second edition of Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales. Since 2000 he has been the Director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., while continuing to teach at the Harvard campus in Cambridge as the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature.
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).
Elizabeth Oyler
Elizabeth Oyler is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include medieval Japanese narrative and performance concerning the Genpei War, particularly the Tale of the Heike. Her book Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan is forthcoming in 2006.
Shelley Fenno Quinn
Shelley Fenno Quinn is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Ohio State University. She researches performance traditions of Japan, especially the Noh theatre. Among her publications is “Oral and Vocal Traditions of Japan” in Teaching Oral Traditions (1998).
Steve Reece
Steve Reece is Professor of Classics at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He has published a wide variety of articles and book chapters on Homeric studies, New Testament studies, comparative oral traditions, historical linguistics, and pedagogy. He is also the author of a book about the rituals of ancient Greek hospitality, The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene (1993), and of a study of early Greek etymology entitled Homer’s Winged Words: The Evolution of Early Greek Epic Diction in the Light of Oral Theory (2009).
Amy Shuman
Amy Shuman is Associate Professor of English and Anthropology at Ohio State University, where she also directs the Center for Folklore Studies. She is the author of Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents (1986) and Redeeming Narrative: Speaking from Experience (forthcoming).
Saad A. Sowayan
Saad Abdullah Sowayan is Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at King Saud University. He has published articles in Arabic and English on the oral literature and spoken language of the Arabian nomads. His major works in English are Nabati Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia (1985) and The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative: An Ethnographic and Linguistic Analysis (1992).
Beverly Stoeltje
Beverly Stoeltje is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University, Bloomington. She is author of Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (1995) and has published articles about Africa, power, law and culture, and American culture.
Timothy R. Tangherlini
Professor Timothy R. Tangherlini holds a joint appointment in the Scandinavian Section and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His current work focuses on storytelling and rural community organization in late nineteenth-century Denmark and on critical approaches to Korean cultural geography. His publications include Interpreting Legend (1994) and Talking Trauma (1998).
Sybil Thornton
Sybil A. Thornton, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, has published extensively on medieval Jishû (a Japanese Buddhist order), the epic, and Japanese cinema.
Alison Tokita
Alison Tokita is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Her publications on Japanese narrative music include Kiyomoto-bushi: Narrative Music of the Kabuki Theatre (1999) and the forthcoming Japanese Music: History, Performance and Research (co-ed.).
M. D. Usher
M. D. Usher is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Vermont. In addition to academic books and articles in the field of Classical Studies, he has written a children's picturebook about Socrates and an opera libretto (in Latin) based on the poetry of Virgil.
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).
Linda White
Linda White (Ph.D. in Basque Studies, 1996) is a researcher at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. She co-authored the Basque-English English-Basque Dictionary as well as translated six books on the Basques; she has also published some thirty articles on various Basque topics.
Jonas Zdanys
Jonas Zdanys earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has taught at Yale University and the State University of New York. He serves presently as Chief Academic Officer in the Connecticut Department of Higher Education. His poetry and translations of Lithuanian literature have filled some twenty volumes, including Water Light (1997) and Lithuanian Crossing (1999).
Steve Zeitlin
Steve Zeitlin (Ph.D. in Folklore, University of Pennsylvania) is the Founding Director of City Lore: The New York Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-director of the People’s Poetry Gathering. His research interests include poetry from the world’s endangered languages and poetry competitions in the Americas. He has edited Because God Loves Stories: An Anthology of Jewish Storytelling (1997).
