Oral Tradition Volume 1, Number 3December 1986
About the Authors
Bruce A. Rosenberg
Professor of American Civilization at Brown University, Bruce Rosenberg has long been a significant force at the intersection of folklore and literature, particularly in medieval studies. His article on Leon Forrest stems from a deep interest in African American oral traditions and folk-preaching, as attested for example by his book Can These Bones Live? (1987).
Ward Parks
Ward Parks is the author of Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Old English and Homeric Traditions (1990) and numerous articles combining interests in medieval English and ancient Greek oral traditional poetry with a perspective from contemporary critical theory. He now resides in Ahmednagar, India, where he has served since 1998 as part of a research team editing and reconstructing materials for the Avatar Meher Baba Trust.
Alexandra Hennessey Olsen
A member of the English department at the University of Denver, Alexandra Hennessey Olsen has written widely on Old and Middle English literature, particularly on their roots in oral tradition and in Latin literature.
Albert B. Lord
Albert B. Lord (Harvard University, Emeritus) truly needs no introduction for anyone working in the field of oral tradition. His comparative research, especially The Singer of Tales (1960), in effect established the Oral Theory as a method subsequently applied to dozens of different traditions. He is near completion of a sequel to that landmark volume.
Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys
Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys (University of Sydney) often work as a investigations of Byzantine popular poetry, studies which regularly tradition out of which these works emerged. Some of their numerous articles field are gathered together in Popular Literature in Byzantium (1983).
Eliza Miruna Ghil
A native Romanian with scholarly training in the Romance literatures, Eliza Miruna Ghil (University of New Orleans) is well qualified to provide this portrait of Vasile Tetin and to work on the medieval French tradition from a uniquely comparative point of view.
Joseph J. Duggan
Joseph J. Duggan, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California/Berkeley, has made many important contributions to the study of medieval texts with roots in oral tradition, perhaps most notably The Song of Roland: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft (1973) and Oral Literature: Seven Essays (1975). He is editor of Romance Philology.
John Miles Foley
The late John Miles Foley was a specialist in the study of the world’s oral traditions. He wrote with particular emphasis on ancient Greek, medieval English, and South Slavic. In 1986 he founded the journal Oral Tradition, and as architect-navigator of the Pathways Project, his last book Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind was published in 2012 (University of Illinois Press). The body of his work is widely recognized as one of the most influential contributions to the study of the world’s oral traditions. Further information is available at his portal (http://johnmilesfoley.org/portal/Welcome.html).
Lee Edgar Tyler
Lee Edgar Tyler’s biography is not available.
Juris Dilevko
Juris Dilevko’s biography is not available.
Patrick Gonder
Patrick Gonder’s biography is not available.
