This special issue of Oral Tradition is published in honor of John Miles Foley’s 65th birthday and 2011 retirement. The surprise Festschrift, guest-edited by Lori and Scott Garner entirely without his knowledge, celebrates John’s tremendous impact on studies in oral tradition through a series of essays contributed by his students from the University of Missouri-Columbia (1979-present) and from NEH Summer Seminars that he has directed (1987-1996).
Oral Tradition Volume 26, Number 2October 2011
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
Timothy W. Boyd
Timothy W. Boyd is an associate research professor in the Department of Classics at the University at Buffalo. His interests include oral performances of heroic material from around the world, British and American poetry from the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, and military history.
Adam Brooke Davis
Adam Brooke Davis completed his dissertation under John Foley’s direction at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1991. Following a postdoctoral year at Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, he has taught medieval literature, folklore, linguistics, and creative writing at Truman State University. He has also occupied a number of administrative roles and serves as editor of the literary journal GHLL and webmaster for the Missouri Folklore Society.
Michael D. C. Drout
Michael D. C. Drout is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. He is the author of Tradition and Influence (forthcoming) and How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (2006), and has edited J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics (2003, rev ed. 2011), the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2006), and the journal Tolkien Studies (2003-present).
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).
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.
R. Scott Garner
R. Scott Garner teaches in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at Rhodes College, where he also serves as the director of the Fellowships Program through which he coordinates experiential learning opportunities for the college’s students. His research interests center around ancient Greek oral traditions, and he is the author of Traditional Elegy: The Interplay of Meter, Tradition, and Context in Early Greek Poetry (2011).
Morgan E. Grey
Morgan Grey is presently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Missouri,-Columbia, where she is working on a dissertation on Ovid. Her research interests include Latin poetry and the reception of classical literature. She has recently published an essay, “Mashups: Ancient and Modern.”
Dave Henderson
Dave Henderson received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2008 and is an independent scholar who lives and works in eastern Missouri. His research has focused on the begging poem in Old and Middle English.
Carolyn Higbie
Carolyn Higbie is Park Professor of Classics at the University at Buffalo. Her most recent publications focus on the Greeks’ knowledge of their past, and her current research explores issues of collection and forgery in ancient Greece.
Holly Hobbs
Holly Hobbs is a public sector ethnomusicologist currently working in conjunction with Tulane University in New Orleans to design and launch a digital archive of post-Katrina hiphop music and oral history, while also serving as an archivist for the popular public radio show American Routes. Hobbs has conducted extensive fieldwork on folk songs and folklife throughout East Africa, Ireland, and the American South, and her interests in musical activism, documentary film, and digital media literacy have led to fascinating work with the Patois International Human Rights Film Festival, The KnowLA Project, and many other projects.
Bonnie D. Irwin
Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Eastern Illinois University, Bonnie D. Irwin has published scholarly and pedagogical essays on the subject of frame tales. She is currently working on an edited volume about teaching the 1001 Nights.
Ruth Knezevich
Ruth Knezevich is a graduate student in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research interests include folklore and oral tradition in literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish studies, and the ballad trends in eighteenth-century Britain.
Wayne Kraft
Wayne Kraft is Professor of German at Eastern Washington University. He participated in John Foley’s 1989 NEH Summer Seminar, “The Oral Tradition in Literature,” and contributed an article to Oral Tradition in the same year entitled “Improvisation in Hungarian Ethnic Dancing: An Analog to Oral Verse Composition.” In 2003 Kraft received an endowed lecture award for “Transylvanian Dancing in the Final Hour” from the Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund for International Scholarship on Dance.
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.
Kayla M. Miller
Kayla M. Miller graduated from Rhodes College with a B.A. in English in 2011. Her research interests include beekeeping, medieval literature, and traditional music. She currently resides in Stockholm, Sweden.
Rebecca Richardson Mouser
Rebecca Richardson Mouser is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia. At present she is writing a dissertation on oral tradition and Middle English alliterative romances that reflect a connection to Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition.
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).
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.
Raymond F. Person, Jr.
Raymond F. Person, Jr., is Professor of Religion at Ohio Northern University. His research interests include the application of oral traditional studies to ancient texts and the application of conversation analysis to literature. Although his primary area of research is the Hebrew Bible, he has also published on Homer, Shakespeare, and modern English-language short stories and novels.
Andrew E. Porter
Andrew E. Porter is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His main research area is ancient epic. Work in progress includes a consideration of Agamemnon’s characterization in the Iliad and Odyssey, and also a study of the range of traditional myths known to Homer and his audience.
Catherine Quick
Catherine Quick is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and Director of the Coastal Bend Writing Project. Her teaching and research areas include rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, English education, and young adult literature. Quick’s book, Fat Kids Rule the Books: The Rhetoric of Obesity in Young Adult Literature, is forthcoming in 2012.
Peter Ramey
Peter Ramey is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he is currently completing a dissertation on the intersection of media and aesthetics in early English poetry. An essay he co-authored with John Miles Foley, “Oral Theory and Medieval Literature,” was recently published in the volume Medieval Oral Literature. Another article, “Variation and the Poetics of Oral Performance in Cædmon’s Hymn,” will appear this coming fall in Neophilologus.
Steve Reece
Steve Reece is Professor of Classics at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He has published a wide variety of articles and book chapters on Homeric studies, New Testament studies, comparative oral traditions, historical linguistics, and pedagogy. He is also the author of a book about the rituals of ancient Greek hospitality, The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene (1993), and of a study of early Greek etymology entitled Homer’s Winged Words: The Evolution of Early Greek Epic Diction in the Light of Oral Theory (2009).
Claire Schmidt
Claire Schmidt is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research interests include Anglo-Saxon oral tradition and hagiography, postcolonial theory, humor theory, and the occupational folklore of twenty-first-century prison workers and social workers. Her essay, “‘She Said She’d Never Even Had Fried Chicken!’: Foodways, Humor, and Race in Bob Roberts,” was the winner of the Sue Samuelson Award for Foodways Scholarship and is forthcoming in the journal Digest.
Bruce E. Shields
Bruce E. Shields is Russell F. and Marian J. Blowers Professor of Christian Ministries emeritus at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. His published works include the books From the Housetops: Preaching in the Early Church and Today (2000) and Preaching Romans (2004).
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.
Derek Updegraff
Derek Updegraff is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he teaches undergraduate courses in literature and creative writing and assists with graduate and undergraduate courses in linguistics and Old English. His research areas include Old English prosody, the alliterative Lives of Ælfric, and the theory and practice of translation. His translations from Old English, Middle English, and Latin have appeared in numerous literary journals.
Sarah Zurhellen
Sarah Zurhellen is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her teaching and research engage with contemporary fiction, new media studies, and trauma theory in order to consider the ways information and anxiety interact in a globalizing world.
