To ensure continuity and foster innovation within the discipline of folklore, we must know what came before. Folklore in the United States and Canada is an essential guide to the history and development of graduate folklore programs throughout the United States and Canada. As the first history of folklore studies since the mid-1980s, this book offers a long overdue look into the development of the earliest programs and the novel directions of more recent programs. The volume is encyclopedic in its coverage and is organized chronologically based on the approximate founding date of each program. Drawing extensively on archival sources, oral histories, and personal experience, the contributors explore the key individuals and central events in folklore programs at US and Canadian academic institutions and demonstrate how these programs have been shaped within broader cultural and historical contexts. Revealing the origins of graduate folklore programs, as well as their accomplishments, challenges, and connections, Folklore in the United States and Canada is an essential read for all folklorists and those who are studying to become folklorists.

About the Author

Patricia Sawin is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Folklore Program in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is author of Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories. Rosemary Levy Zumwalt is Vice President Emerita and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Agnes Scott College. She is author of American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent and (with Isaac Jack Levy) Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women: Sweetening the Spirits and Healing the Sick.

Reviews

When the volume's intended readers pick it up, they will be certain to turn first to the program where they studied and which shaped them (which this reviewer confesses she did), but they should come away from the volume with a much better sense of their own academic legacy and of the astonishing variety of academic folklore (heritage, popular culture, etc.) programs that exist in North America today. Each has its own emphasis, theoretical profile, ethos, and mission, but together they have the power to be greater thanthe sum of their parts. The volume also reminds readers that, while folkloristics may no longer be an "emerging" discipline, the future health of the field will need constant and careful curation.

-- Maria Carlson * Folklorica *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253052896
Author Patricia Sawin
Format Paperback
Page Count 322
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 476g