Oral Tradition Volume 28, Number 2October 2013
About the Authors
Mark Turin
Mark Turin is an Associate Research Scientist at Yale University and Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative. His research interests include language documentation, endangerment, and orality. Trained as an anthropologist and linguist, he directs the Digital Himalaya and the World Oral Literature Projects, collocated at Cambridge and Yale Universities. Additionally, he is the incoming Chair of the First Nations Languages Program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His most recent book treats social inclusion in Nepal.
Patricia Fumerton
Patricia Fumerton is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive, or EBBA (http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu). She is author of Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (2006) and Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (1991) and editor of Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings (2013).
Eric Nebeker
Eric Nebeker’s research interests focus on the varied and ever-present influence of early modern English broadside ballads on literary history and printed poetry. His work has been published in edited collections and journals such as ELH and SEL: Studies in English Literature. He served as English Broadside Ballad Archive’s Assistant Director from 2010-12 and as Acting co-Director in 2012-13. He is currently a grant writer for the Office of Education Partnerships at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dmitri A. Funk
Dmitri A. Funk, Doctor of Historical Sciences (in anthropology), is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnology at Moscow State University, as well as leading researcher at Tomsk State University. His academic interests include social transformations in post-Soviet countries and religions and epics in Northern Asia. Among his recent books are Post-Soviet Transformations (2009, ed. with H. Beach and L. Sillanpää) and The North and the Northern People: Contemporary Situation among the Small Numbered Indigenous Peoples of the North of the Russian Federation (2012, ed. with N. Novikova, in Russian).
Julia C. Bishop
Julia C. Bishop is a research associate in the School of Education, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. She studies children’s folklore from historical and contemporary perspectives, and is particularly interested in multimodal approaches to musical play and the relationship between media and play. She is co-author of Changing Play (2014) and has published several recent articles on clapping games in Children, Media, and Playground Cultures (2013) and Children’s Games in the New Media Age (2014).
Outi Lauhakangas
Outi Lauhakangas, Dr. Soc. S., is a social psychologist specializing in paremiological research. Her doctoral thesis examined the functions of proverbs in social interaction (2004). Her contributions on paremiology include the publication of the Matti Kuusi International Type System of Proverbs, originally developed by Matti Kuusi. She serves as editorial consultant for the journal Proverbium and is the current president of the General Assembly of the International Association of Paremiology (Tavira, Portugal).
Lauri Harvilahti
Lauri Harvilahti is the Director of the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society. His research interests and activities include epic poetry, Finnish Kalevala poetry, folklore archive research, ethno-cultural worldviews, issues of cultural identity, and the history of folkloristics. He has carried out fieldwork in Russia, the Upper Altay in China, India, Bangladesh, and Kenya. His publications include four monographs, seven singly edited or co-edited volumes, and several dozen articles or book chapters, in various languages.
Kate Darian-Smith
Kate Darian-Smith is Professor of Australian Studies and History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and Professor of Cultural Heritage in the University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning. She has published widely in Australian social and cultural history, on topics including the history and memorialization of childhood. She has held several government appointments in the fields of education, history, and culture. Recent publications include Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (2013, with C. Pascoe).
Natalie Kononenko
Natalie Kononenko is Professor and Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Ukrainian Minstrels: And the Blind Shall Sing (1998) and Slavic Folklore: A Handbook (2007). Her interests include folk narrative, digital humanities, folklore and film, and Diasporic communities. She has conducted fieldwork in the Ukraine and Turkey as well as among the Ukrainian Diaspora in Canada and Kazakhstan.
Nick Thieberger
Nick Thieberger is an Australian Research Council QEII Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne who has produced a grammar, texts, and dictionary for a language of central Vanuatu. Additionally, he serves as Director of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC).
Andrea L. Berez
Andrea L. Berez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she teaches in the Language Documentation and Conservation program. She is also the director of the Kaipulehone Digital Ethnographic Archive. She has been working for over a decade with speakers of Alaska Athabascan languages and since 2012 has been undertaking linguistic fieldwork in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. She is currently co-editing a volume on language contact in the Americas.
Dwight F. Reynolds
Dwight F. Reynolds is professor of Arabic language and Literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Egyptian Oral Epic Tradition (1995) and Arab Folklore (2007), co-author and editor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), and co-editor of The Garland Encyclopedia of Word Music: The Middle East (2002).
Evelyn Birge Vitz
Evelyn (Timmie) Birge Vitz is Professor of French at New York University and Affiliated Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Comparative Literature. Much of her recent work bears on performance. She teaches courses in which students perform scenes from medieval narrative. Her relevant books are Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (1999), Performing Medieval Literature (2005, with Nancy Freeman Regalado and Marilyn Lawrence), and Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean (2014, with Arzu Ozturkmen).
Marilyn Lawrence
Marilyn Lawrence writes on literature and the performing arts in the Middle Ages. Her publications include the books Performing Medieval Literature (2005, with Evelyn Birge Vitz and Nancy Freeman Regalado) and Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative: Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (2009, with Philip F. Kennedy). She holds a B.A. from Princeton University (in Comparative Literature, with theater and dance) and a Ph.D. (in French) from New York University, where she is Visiting Scholar in the French Department.
Risto Järv
Risto Järv is Head of the Estonian Folklore Archives at the Estonian Literary Museum and is Associate Professor in the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu, Institute of Culture Studies and Arts. His research interests include Estonian folktale tradition, contemporary storytelling, and folklore and tourism.
William Schneider
William Schneider is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where he ran the oral history program for many years. An anthropologist by training, Schneider's research interests include documenting historic sites, subsistence research, and life histories based on oral history. He is strongly influenced by folklorists and their appreciation for how we use stories to convey meaning.
Julia C. Bishop
Julia C. Bishop is a research associate in the School of Education, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. She studies children’s folklore from historical and contemporary perspectives, and is particularly interested in multimodal approaches to musical play and the relationship between media and play. She is co-author of Changing Play (2014) and has published several recent articles on clapping games in Children, Media, and Playground Cultures (2013) and Children’s Games in the New Media Age (2014).
David Atkinson
David Atkinson is currently an honorary research fellow of the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, UK. He is a member of a team working on the James Madison Carpenter Collection Project, which seeks to publish the collection in a critical edition and to present the digital images and sound files of the collection materials as a freely accessible online resource (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/carpenter/elements/). He recently published The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts (Atkinson 2014).
Robert Young Walser
Robert Young Walser is currently an honorary research fellow of the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, UK. He is a member of a team working on the James Madison Carpenter Collection Project, which seeks to publish the collection in a critical edition and to present the digital images and sound files of the collection materials as a freely accessible online resource (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/carpenter/elements/). He recently published the CD Outward Bound on the J. M. Carpenter (Walser 2010).
Ríonach uí Ógáin
Professor Ríonach uí Ógáin is Director of the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin. She has published widely on traditional music and song and has also published a number of compact discs with accompanying booklets. Her most recent publication is The Otherworld: Music and Song from Irish Tradition (2012, ed. with Tom Sherlock). She is the current editor of Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society.
Bruce Rosenstock
Bruce Rosenstock is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently working on vitalist philosophies in Weimar, Germany. He is the author of New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile (2002) and Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond (2010).
Belén Bistué
Belén Bistué is Assistant Researcher in Comparative Literature for CONICET and Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Argentina. As a doctoral student, she worked in the transcription lab of the Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews archive. Her current research focuses on the history of translation practices during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. She is the author of Collaborative Practices and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe (2013).
Beverley Diamond
Beverley Diamond is the Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place (MMaP). Her research on indigenous music has ranged from studies of Inuit drum dance and Saami joik to indigenous audio recording and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools. Her publications include Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges (2012), Native American Music in Eastern North America (2008), and Music and Gender (2000).
Ian Brodie
Ian Brodie is an associate professor of Folklore in the History and Culture department of Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia. His principal research interests are the intersection of folk culture (whether “traditional” or emergent) and popular culture, including vernacular talk, local food, comic books, and street art. His book A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy will be released in 2014 from the University Press of Mississippi.
David F. Elmer
David F. Elmer is Professor of the Classics at Harvard University and Associate Curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. His research focuses on ancient Greek epic, especially the Homeric poems; the ancient Greek and Roman novels; and the oral epic traditions of the former Yugoslavia. He is the author of The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad (2013), and his articles have appeared in Classical Antiquity, Classical Philology, Transactions of the American Philological Society, the Journal of American Folklore, and Oral Tradition.
John Shaw
Dr. John Shaw is currently Honorary Fellow in the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, where he served as Senior Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology for many years. He directed the Calum Maclean Project and its later iterations from 2006-13 and has contributed to digital folklore projects based on Gaelic traditions. His research interests and publications focus on Gaelic ethnology, including traditional narrative, song, and instrumental music.
Andrew Wiseman
Dr. Andrew Wiseman received his Ph.D. from Edinburgh University’s Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies in 2007. He has served as a Researcher with the Calum Maclean Project (2006-09) and as a Research Associate with the University’s Carmichael-Watson digital project (2009-11). His research interests lie in the areas of Gaelic oral and musical traditions, and he has published extensively on the life and work of Calum Maclean.
Lillis Ó Laoire
Lillis Ó Laoire is currently Head of School for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His teaching and research interests include the Irish language, Celtic culture, and folklore. He has won national awards for his traditional singing in the Irish Language and has published in the area of Irish song studies, including a monograph on the singing of Tory Island, Ireland. His biography of Joe Heaney, co-written with Sean Williams, won the Alan P. Merriam Prize in 2012.
Nicole Revel
Nicole Revel is Emeritus Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris (CNRS). Her recent publications include Songs of Memory in Islands of Southeast Asia (2013, ed.) and Literature of Voice: Epics in the Philippines (2008, ed.). She has conducted extensive fieldwork for over forty years on Palawan language and oral traditions, and in 1991 began documenting Palawan intangible heritage with the goal of a multimedia archive in mind, now The Philippine Epics and Ballads Archive.
Susan Smyth Kung
Susan Smythe Kung, Ph.D., is the Manager of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a documentary field linguist who has extensively researched and documented Huehuetla Tepehua, an endangered, indigenous language spoken in Mexico. All of the oral histories and language data that she collected during her fieldwork can be found on the AILLA website (www.ailla.utexas.org) under the language name Tepehua de Hueheutla.
Joel Sherzer
Joel Sherzer, Ph.D., is the director of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America and Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Sherzer spent many years conducting research with the Kuna in Panamá, and his Kuna Collection on AILLA includes recordings, texts, books, articles, and photographs. His many publications include Stories, Myths, Chants and Songs of the Kuna Indians (2004) and Verbal Art in San Blas: Kuna Culture Through its Discourse (1990).
