Oral Tradition Volume 26, Number 1March 2011
About the Authors
Moradewun Adejunmobi
Moradewun Adejunmobi is Professor of African Studies at the University of California, Davis. She does research on popular media, literacy, performance, and intercultural communication in West Africa. Some of her recent publications include “Nollywood, Globalization, and Regional Media Corporations in Africa” (2011) and “Technorality, Literature, and Vernacular Literacy in Twenty-First Century Africa” (2008).
Eric Shepherd
Eric Shepherd is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Director of the Chinese Section in the Department of World Languages at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Eat Shandong: From Personal Experience to a Pedagogy of a Second Culture (2005) and has published articles on teaching Chinese, interpersonal relationships, etiquette, and oral traditions in China. He was trained as a Shandong fast tale performer by master storyteller Wu Yanguo and performs professionally in both China and the United States.
Ildikó Bellér-Hann
Ildikó Bellér-Hann studied in Budapest, Cambridge, and Berlin. She has worked as a researcher at various British and German universities and is currently Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. Her recent publications include Community Matters in Xinjiang 1880-1949: Towards A Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur (2008), and “The Mobilisation of Tradition: Localism and Identity among the Uyghur of Xinjiang” in Ethnicity, Authority, and Power in Central Asia: New Games Great and Small (2011).
Raushan Sharshenova
Raushan Sharshenova is Associate Professor in the English department at the Kyrgyz State University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She and Ildikó Bellér-Hann have collaborated several times in their studies of Turkic oral traditions.
Christopher Livanos
Christopher Livanos is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His publications discuss the literature and religion of the Byzantine Empire and medieval Italy, while his research interests include the Classical tradition in medieval literature and the history of relations between Eastern and Western Europe. His recent publications include Greek Tradition and Latin Influence in the Work of George Scholarios (2006).
Robert Mann
Robert Mann is a writer and researcher based in Florida. In addition to his works of fiction (The Master and Marmeladov, Where the Ice Never Melts, among other titles), he has published studies of Dostoevsky, Babel, Bely, Bulgakov, the Russian folk epic, and the the Kulikovo Cycle. He has unwaveringly argued that the twelfth-century Igor Tale is an oral composition and recently found new textual parallels linking the rare Golovin edition of the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche that evidence the oral nature and the authenticity of the Igor Tale as a genuine twelfth-century song. Golovin's rare text and Mann’s commentary appear in Volume 8 of Monuments of Early Russian Literature (Berkeley Slavic Specialties).
Aaron Phillip Tate
Aaron Phillip Tate writes at the intersection of classical philology, history of philosophy, oral epic studies, and folklore. He has published in several venues including ARV, Folklore, Oral Tradition, and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, and has recently completed a study of contemporary electroacoustic improvisation for the volume BSC: Manual. He has given papers in China, Croatia, Finland, France, and the United States.
Minako Sakata
Minako Sakata received a doctorate in Area Studies from the University of Tokyo. She is currently Research Associate at the University of Tokyo, and teaches undergraduate courses at Hosei University. Current interests include inter-genre referentiality in Ainu oral literature and Ainu ethnohistory. Among her recent publications are “Tukupita no shucho no monogatari: Ainu Ethnohistory o sozo suru” (2011) and Ainu kosho bungaku no epistemology: rekishi no hoho toshiteno Ainu sanbunsetsuwa (in press).
Paul Koerbin
Paul Koerbin’s doctoral research in the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney focuses on Turkish Alevi song and particularly aspects of function and meaning in the self-naming convention employed in the lyrics. A former professional musician and a performer on the bağlama, he currently works at the National Library of Australia and has published a number of articles on various aspects of web archiving.
Margo Kitts
Margo Kitts is Associate Professor of Humanities and Coordinator of Religious Studies and East-West Classical Studies at Hawai’i Pacific University on Oahu. Her research interests include Homer, ritual studies, religious violence, and the anthropology of revenge. Kitts is the author of Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society (2005, 2011) and co-editor of State, Power, and Violence (2010), Princeton Readings in Religion and Violence (2011), and the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (forthcoming).
