Oral Tradition Volume 3, Number 3October 1988
About the Authors
Jeff Opland
Like three other authors in this issue, Jeff Opland has put his fieldwork, in this case principally among the Xhosa-speaking peoples of South Africa, to excellent use in his writings on oral tradition. As an Africanist and an Anglo-Saxonist, he has contributed important studies in both fields, particularly Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry (1980) and Xhosa Oral Poetry (1983).
Walter J. Ong
One of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of study that Oral Tradition serves, Walter J. Ong, now University Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Saint Louis University, has published a brilliant succession of books and articles, among them The Presence of the Word (1967), Interfaces of the Word (1977), Fighting for Life (1981), and Orality and Literacy (1982).
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).
Luisa Del Giudice
Luisa Del Giudice published literary criticism (on Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Tasso) before focusing on Italian folklore, primarily ballads. She has edited Western Gerusalem: University of California Studies on Tasso (1984), and her field-collected narrative songs are soon to be distributed in a commercial recording directed by ethnomusicologist Robert Leydi.
Jill Brody
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge), Jill Brody has likewise conducted fi eldwork on oral tradition, in her case among Tojolabal Mayan communities in Mexico near the Guatemalan border. Her prior publications include articles on discourse genres and conversational strategies in Tojolabal.
Margaret Hiebert Beissinger
Margaret H. Beissinger is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of The Art of the Lautar: The Epic Tradition of Romania (Garland, 1991) and an editor of Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (California, 1999), she has written widely on the Balkan epic as well as Romani traditional music and musicians. She is currently working on a monograph, “Music is our life!” Culture and Performance among Romanian Gypsy Musicians.
