Oral Tradition Volume 23, Number 1March 2008
About the Authors
Fatos Tarifa
Fatos Tarifa holds doctorates in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in political science from the University of Tirana, and is presently Professor of Political Science at Eastern Michigan University. He has also served as the Albanian ambassador to the Netherlands (1998-2001) and to the United States (2001-05). His publications include Culture, Ideology, and Society (2001), To Albania, With Love (2007), and Europe Adrift on the Wine-Dark Sea (2007). More about his distinguished career is available in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatos_Tarifa)
Florence Goyet
Florence Goyet is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Grenoble (France). Her chief interest is polyphony in literature. She is the author of La Nouvelle, 1870-1925: Maupassant, Verga, Chekhov, Henry James, AKUTAGAWA Ryûnosuke: Description d’un genre à son apogée (1993) and of Penser sans concept: Fonction de l’épopée guerrière: Iliade, Chanson de Roland, Hogen et Heiji monogatari (2006). She is currently working on the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.
Marie Nelson
Marie Nelson received her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1973, and has taught a variety of medieval literature, linguistics, and writing courses at the University of Florida. She has published two books, Structures of Opposition in Old English Poetry (1989) and Judith, Juliana, and Elene: Three Fighting Saints (1991), as well as a number of essays on Old, Middle, and modern English literature in Speculum, Neophilologus, Mythlore, Oral Tradition, and other journals.
Nancy P. Stork
Nancy P. Stork received her Ph.D. in 1985 from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Old English and Latin and worked on the Dictionary of Old English. She has written on Aldhelm’s Riddles, the Battle of Maldon, Margery Kempe, monastic sign language, Jacques Fournier’s inquisition records, and John Steinbeck. Currently Associate Chair of English, San Jose State University, she is grateful to SJSU for a sabbatical spent happily at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Susan Gorman
Susan Gorman is an assistant professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. She has published articles on the genres of epic and novel in the West African literary tradition, and her present contribution to Oral Tradition emerges from similar studies in classical antiquity. She is currently working on exploring genre use in West African films.
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.
Lene Petersen
Lene Petersen teaches early modern drama, literature, and culture in the Department of English at the University of the West of England. Her main research area is early modern text and attribution studies, focusing on the so-called “bad” quartos and co-authored playtexts. She is also a translator of Danish renaissance manuscripts into English. Her most recent work has concerned stylistic and linguistic aspects of authorship in dramatic texts dating from Shakespeare’s time, and she has published an online version of the Korpus of Early Modern Playtexts in English (2004).
Owain Edwards
Owain Edwards is a music historian, organist, and composer, as well as a professor of music history at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo. He has research interests in British music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and medieval liturgical chant and literature. More recently, he has been considering the Latin legends of saints from the middle ages. Among his numerous publications are Joseph Parry, 1841-1903 (1970); Beethoven (1972); and English Eighteenth-Century Concertos––An Inventory and Thematic Catalogue (2005).
Thérèse de Vet
Thérèse de Vet is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research on orality and literacy is informed by several decades of fieldwork in Bali and her academic training in classics. Her recent article, “Parry in Paris: Structuralism, Historical Linguistics, and the Oral Theory” (2005), inspired her current work on the history of scholarship and ideas as they relate to literacy and orality, and on how these humanistic beliefs were transferred unexamined into the new field of anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century.
