Oral Tradition Volume 20, Number 2October 2005
About the Authors
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).
Andrew Gerstle
C. Andrew Gerstle is Professor of Japanese Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Publications include Kabuki Heroes and the Osaka Stage: 1780-1830 (2005), Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays (2001), Theatre as Music: the Bunraku Play ‘Mt. Imo and Mt. Se (1990, co-authored), Eighteenth Century Japan (1989, ed.), and Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu (1986).
Haruo Shirane
Haruo Shirane is Shinchō Professor of Japanese Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji (1987), Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (1997), and Classical Japanese: A Grammar (2005). He is also editor of Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology (2002) and Inventing the Classics: Canon Formation, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (2001).
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).
Karen Barber
Karin Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. She has researched extensively on Yoruba oral and popular genres, and on African cultures more widely. Her most recent book was The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (2000).
Martin Orwin
Martin Orwin is Lecturer in Somali and Amharic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His research interests lie in the field of language use in poetry, particularly meter. He is also involved in the translation of Somali and Amharic poetry into English.
James Burns
James Burns is Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at Binghamton University. His research spans the music, languages, religions, and literatures of Africa and the Diaspora. He has conducted over five years of ongoing fieldwork in Ghana, Togo, and Benin with Ewe-Fon, Akan, and Dagbamba (Dagomba) ethnic groups. He has compiled a CD of Ewe dance-drumming entitled Ewe Drumming from Ghana: “The Soup which is Sweet Draws the Chairs in Closer” (2005) and is himself a performer of African and Afro-Caribbean traditional music.
Wilt Idema
Wilt L. Idema obtained his Ph.D. at Leiden University (Netherlands) in 1974, and has published widely, both in Dutch and in English, on traditional Chinese drama, vernacular fiction, and storytelling. Since 2000 he has taught as Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard. His most recent publications include The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (with Beata Grant; 2004), and Boeddha, hemel en hel. Boeddhisistische verhalen uit Dunhuang (2004).
Andrew Lo
Andrew Lo is Senior Lecturer in Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. His research interests are Chinese literature of the Ming-Qing periods and the cultural life of Chinese literati, especially games. Recent publications include articles on the history of various Chinese games in Asian Games: The Art of Contest (2004, ed. by Colin Mackenzie and Irving Finkel).
