Oral Tradition Volume 18, Number 2October 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
Mark C. Amodio
Mark C. Amodio, Professor of English at Vassar College, is the author of Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England (2004). He has recently co-edited, with Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr. (2003).
Samuel G. Armistead
Samuel G. Armistead is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Classics at the University of California at Davis. He has published widely (some twenty-five book-length publications, together with several hundred articles) on medieval Spanish literature, modern Hispanic oral literature, and comparative literature.
Sabir Badalkhan
Sabir Badalkhan, Ph.D. in folklore (“Minstrelsy Tradition in Balochistan,” Naples, 1994), teaches at the University of Naples. His research interests include oral tradition in Balochistan (both in Pakistan and Iran); itinerant musicians, singers, and storytellers in southwest Asia; and the presence of African musical culture in Pakistan. He has published widely on Balochi oral traditions, and among his articles are “The Changing Contents of Baloch Women’s Songs” and “An Introduction to the Performance of Verbal Art in Balochistan.”
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).
Naran Bilik
Naran Bilik is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociocultural Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Bernstein Visiting Professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology (2003-06) at Carleton College. He is interested in semiotic approaches to ethnicity and politico-cultural boundaries.
Mary Ellen Brown
Mary Ellen Brown, Professor of Folklore at the University of Indiana, is the editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. Her research interests in folklore include “all things Scottish,” as evidenced by numerous articles in that area and by her 1984 book on Burns and Tradition.
Isabel Cardigos
Isabel Cardigos is founder and director of a center for oral literature (Centro de Estudos Ataide Oliveira) at the University of Algarve. She is the co-director of its yearly journal, Estudos de Literatura Oral (Studies in Oral Literature). She has recently written the entries on “Portugal” and “Shoes” for the Enzyklopädie des Märchens.
Michael Chesnutt
Michael Chesnutt is Professor of medieval and folklore studies at the Arnamagnaean Institute, University of Copenhagen. His recent publications include the final volume of the Faroese ballad corpus and a major study of medieval Danish liturgy.
Robert Cochran
Robert Cochran is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, where he chairs the American Studies program and directs the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies. His latest book is Come Walk With Me (2004); his survey of Arkansas music, Our Own Sweet Sounds, will be published in 2005. He is currently at work on a biography of Nebraska folklorist Louise Pound.
Mary-Ann Constantine
Mary-Ann Constantine directs the Iolo Morganwg Project at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth, where she is studying Romantic literary forgery. Her Breton Ballads (1996) won the Katharine Briggs Award for Folklore in 1996, and, with Gerald Porter, she has recently published Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song (2003).
Robert Payson Creed
Robert Payson Creed is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published widely on Beowulf and comparative oral traditions, including Old English Poetry: Fifteen Essays (1967) and Reconstructing the Rhythm of Beowulf (1990).
Olga Merck Davidson
Olga Merck Davidson is Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. She has published numerous studies on Persian and Iranian oral tradition, including Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (1994) and more recently Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry (2000).
Sioned Davies
Sioned Davies, Professor of Welsh at Cardiff University, has published extensively on medieval storytelling as reflected in the tales of the Mabinogion. Her current project, “Performing from the Pulpit,” examines the dramatic preaching of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wales.
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).
Marcia Farr
Marcia Farr is Professor of Education and English at Ohio State University. Her recent work includes explorations of oral language and literacy within Mexican families in Chicago and Mexico, and an edited book, Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City’s Neighborhoods (2003).
Lori Ann Garner
Lori Ann Garner is Assistant Professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England (2011) and has published articles on medieval English poetry and oral traditions. Her current research focuses on Anglo-Saxon charms and remedies.
Lauri Harvilahti
Lauri Harvilahti is the Director of the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society. His research interests and activities include epic poetry, Finnish Kalevala poetry, folklore archive research, ethno-cultural worldviews, issues of cultural identity, and the history of folkloristics. He has carried out fieldwork in Russia, the Upper Altay in China, India, Bangladesh, and Kenya. His publications include four monographs, seven singly edited or co-edited volumes, and several dozen articles or book chapters, in various languages.
Edward R. Haymes
Edward R. Haymes teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at Cleveland State University. He has published on Middle High German epic, Old Norse poetry and prose, and Richard Wagner. His most recent book is Das Nibelungenlied: Geschichte und Interpretation (1999).
Dafydd Johnston
Dafydd Johnston is Professor of Welsh at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is a specialist in medieval Welsh poetry, and is currently leading a project to produce a new edition of the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym in electronic format. His publications include The Literature of Wales (1994) and A Guide to Welsh Literature (1998).
Joshua T. Katz
Joshua T. Katz is Assistant Professor of Classics and a member of the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University. Widely published in Indo-European historical, comparative linguistics, his current research focuses on words pertaining to animals.
Heather Maring
Heather Maring is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, where she teaches Old English, Medieval English Poetics, and Studies in Oral Traditions. She has recently published articles on oral-traditional idioms in Old English verse, including “Two Ships Crossing: Hybrid Poetics in The Dream of the Rood” in English Studies (2010) and “Bright Voice of Praise: An Old English Convention” in Studies in Philology (2011). Maring has also served as a consultant for the Section on Intangible Cultural Heritage at UNESCO.
J. J. Dias Marques
J. J. Dias Marques has been studying Portuguese oral tradition for over twenty years, concentrating on the ballad. He teaches oral literature at the University of Algarve and is assistant editor of the journal Estudos de Literatura Oral.
William Bernard McCarthy
William Bernard McCarthy, author of The Ballad Matrix (1990), teaches English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. He is currently editing a survey collection of United States folk tales.
Stephen Mitchell
Stephen Mitchell, Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University, writes on performance, magic, and witchcraft as well as the Old Icelandic sagas and related forms, as evidenced by his Heroic Sagas and Ballads (1991). He is also curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and co-editor of its publication series.
Joseph Falaky Nagy
Joseph Falaky Nagy is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Co-Coordinator of the UCLA Program in Oral Tradition Studies. He is the author of books and articles on medieval Celtic narrative, including Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (1997).
John D. Niles
John D. Niles is Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a specialist in Beowulf and other Old English poetry, and his most recent book is Homo Narrans (1999).
Carlos Nogueira
Carlos Nogueira holds an M.A. in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from the University of Porto, where he is currently working on his Ph.D. in Portuguese literature and studying satire in Portuguese poetry. His publications include the Popular Song-Book of Baião (2 vols., 1996, 2002) and the Narrative Song-Book of Baião (2003).
Andy Orchard
Andy Orchard is a Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and currently Provost and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College. He is a former Reader in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and has written widely in those areas, as well as in the field of Medieval Latin. He is currently completing a translation of the Poetic Edda for Penguin Classics, as well as books on Cynewulf, Wulfstan, and the Anglo-Saxon riddle tradition.
Chan Park
Chan E. Park is Associate Professor of Korean language, literature, and performance studies at Ohio State University. She researches p’ansori, Korean story-singing, related oral narrative/lyrical/dramatic traditions, and their place in the shaping of modern Korean drama. Among her publications is Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story-Singing (2003).
J. M. Pedrosa
J. M. Pedrosa is Professor of the Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Alcalá, Madrid. He has authored more than 20 books (including his latest, Bestiario: Antropología y simbolismo animal [2002]) and some 200 articles; he carries on research in Spain, Latin America, and Central Africa.
Suzanne H. Petersen
Suzanne H. Petersen, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Washington, works on the pan-Hispanic traditional ballad and the poetics of orally transmitted poetry. Her interactive bibliographical and textual databases and music archives are updated monthly and published online at http://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/.
Tom Pettitt
Tom Pettitt is a Research Professor affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for Medieval Literature and Cultural Sciences Institute. Designed ultimately to elucidate the vernacular cultures of medieval Europe, his research encompasses oral traditions such as customs, ballads, wondertales, and legends, as well as folk aspects in the work of Renaissance dramatists. He has also contributed to exploring the notion of a “Gutenberg Parenthesis,” which suggests (in line with the work of John Miles Foley) a compatibility between digital and pre-print cultures.
Della Pollock
Della Pollock, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Telling Bodies Performing Birth (1999) and editor of Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History (1998). Her research interests include the politics of performance and the performance of everyday narrative.
Burton Raffel
Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His most recent books are a fully annotated edition of Hamlet (2003), the first in a series of such editions from Yale University Press, and a new translation of Stendahl’s The Red and the Black (2003).
Karl Reichl
Karl Reichl is Professor of English philology at the University of Bonn. He is the author of books on Middle English literature, English word-formation, and Turkic oral epic poetry, including Singing the Past (2000) and a German translation of the Uzbek heroic epic Alpamish (2001). He is at present preparing a performance-oriented edition of the repertoire of a Karakalpak oral epic singer from Uzbekistan.
William Schneider
William Schneider is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where he ran the oral history program for many years. An anthropologist by training, Schneider's research interests include documenting historic sites, subsistence research, and life histories based on oral history. He is strongly influenced by folklorists and their appreciation for how we use stories to convey meaning.
Gísli Sigurðsson
Gísli Sigur∂sson is Professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland. His publications focus on oral tradition and orally derived medieval texts as well as folktales and folklore of more recent times. His books include Gaelic Influence in Iceland (1988, reissued 2000), Eddukvæ∂i (1998), and The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method (forthcoming in English).
Maria V. Stanyukovich
Maria V. Stanyukovich is Senior Researcher at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, Lecturer at St. Petersburg State University, and a member of the Coordinating Board of the Center for the Study of Epic Traditions, Russia. In addition to her research on Philippine oral epics and shamanism in the Philippines, she has conducted fieldwork in Cuba, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia.
John Zemke
John Zemke is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages, University of Missouri, Columbia. He has published on medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature and is currently editing Hebrew letter Spanish manuscripts. His forthcoming book is Moses ben Baruch Almosnino, Regimiento de la vida and Tratado de los suenyos (Constantinople, 1564) (2004).
