Oral Tradition Volume 30, Number 1March 2016
About the Authors
Kerry Hull
Kerry Hull is a Professor in the department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. His academic interests include Maya linguistics and anthropology, Polynesian linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and Maya epigraphic studies. He recently published “Pluvial Aspects of the Mesoamerican Cultural Hero the ‘Kumix Angel’ of the Ch’orti’ Mayas and other Rain-Bringing Heroes,” Anthropos (2014) with Edwin Braakhuis.
Cheikh Tidiane Lo
Cheikh Tidiane Lo is a Fulbright international Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington. He conducts research on West African cultural heritage and folklore. Prior to coming to IU, Mr. Lo received his B.A. and M.A. from the Université de Saint Louis, Senegal. He was awarded the John W. Ashton Scholarship by the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and has presented his research at annual meetings of the African Studies Association and the American Folklore Society.
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).
Chris Mustazza
Chris Mustazza is a doctoral student of American poetry and poetics at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the editor of Clipping, a journal devoted to experimental digital analyses of poetry audio. For academic year 2015-2016, he received a Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room grant to complete his dissertation, The Birth of the American Poetry Audio Archive, which examines the beginnings of that archive. In addition, he has edited collections of poetry audio read by Vachel Lindsay, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Harriet Monroe, and Edgar Lee Masters for the PennSound archive.
Dmitry Nikolayev
Dmitry Nikolayev is a Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Theoretical Folkloristics at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and a Research Fellow at the Center for Typology and Semiotics of Folklore at the Russian State University for Humanities (where he received his Ph.D. in folkloristics and medieval Irish studies). His research interests include interaction of oral and written traditions in medieval literature and computerized analysis of oral texts.
Jillian G. Shoichet
Jillian Shoichet holds a Ph.D. from the University of Victoria (Canada) and a M.A. in publishing from Simon Fraser University (Canada). Her doctoral research focused on the use of texts by members of oral-traditional groups to transmit subversive ideas across time and space. She is interested in how diverse oral-traditional cultures use texts in seemingly similar ways as vehicles for the clandestine expression of resistance.
