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American Folklore Society
The American Folklore Society (AFS) is the United States (US)-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world, which aims to encourage research, aid in disseminating that research, promote the responsible application of that research, publish various forms of publications, advocate for the continued study and teaching of folklore, etc. The Society is based at Indiana University and has an annual meeting every October. The Society's quarterly publication is the ''Journal of American Folklore''. The current president is Marilyn White. As of 2016, almost half of its 2,200 members practice their work outside higher education. In addition to professors, members include public folklorists, arts administrators, freelance researchers, librarians, museum curators, and others involved in the study and promotion of folklore and traditional culture. History AFS was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell, who stood at the center of ...
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Professional Association
A professional association (also called a professional body, professional organization, or professional society) is a group that usually seeks to advocacy, further a particular profession, the interests of individuals and organisations engaged in that profession, and the public interest. In the United States, such an association is typically a nonprofit business league for tax purposes. In the UK, they may take a variety of legal forms. Roles The roles of professional associations have been variously defined: "A group of people in a learned occupation who are entrusted with maintaining control or oversight of the legitimate practice of the occupation;" also a body acting "to safeguard the public interest;" organizations which "represent the interest of the professional practitioners," and so "act to maintain their own privileged and powerful position as a controlling body." Professional associations are ill defined although often have commonality in purpose and activities. In the U ...
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Journal Of The Folklore Institute
The ''Journal of Folklore Research: An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology'' is a triannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on folklore, folklife, and ethnomusicology. It was established in 1942 and is published by Indiana University Press. History The journal was established in 1942 as the ''Hoosier Folklore Bulletin'' and continued in 1945 as ''Hoosier Folklore''. It was renamed in 1951 as ''Midwest Folklore'' () and continued from 1964 to 1983 under Richard Dorson as the ''Journal of the Folklore Institute'' (), obtaining its current name in 1984. Since July 2002, the journal has been published and distributed by thIndiana University Press The journal is run by thDepartment of Folklore and Ethnomusicologyat Indiana University Bloomington. Following Richard Dorson, the following persons have been editors-in-chief of the journal: Mary Ellen Brown, John Holmes McDowell, Moira Marsh, Judah Cohen, Jason Baird Jackson, Michael Foster, and Ray Cash ...
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Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax (; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music during the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and filmmaker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the U.S. and in England which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and especially the early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later, alone and with others. Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs. After 1942, when Congress terminated the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently i ...
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James P
James may refer to: People * James (given name) * James (surname) * James (musician), aka Faruq Mahfuz Anam James, (born 1964), Bollywood musician * James, brother of Jesus * King James (other), various kings named James * Prince James (other) * Saint James (other) Places Canada * James Bay, a large body of water * James, Ontario United Kingdom * James College, York, James College, a college of the University of York United States * James, Georgia, an unincorporated community * James, Iowa, an unincorporated community * James City, North Carolina * James City County, Virginia ** James City (Virginia Company) ** James City Shire * James City, Pennsylvania * St. James City, Florida Film and television * James (2005 film), ''James'' (2005 film), a Bollywood film * James (2008 film), ''James'' (2008 film), an Irish short film * James (2022 film), ''James'' (2022 film), an Indian Kannada-language film * "James", a television Adventure Time (season 5)#ep42, ...
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Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is '' Their Eyes Were Watching God'', published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays. Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research as a scholar at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity. She also wrote about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Re ...
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Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1848 – July 3, 1908) was an American journalist and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at ''The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Atlanta Constitution''. Harris led two professional lives: as the editor and journalist known as Joe Harris, he supported a vision of the New South with the editor Henry W. Grady (1880–1889), which stressed regional and racial reconciliation after the Reconstruction era; as Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many 'Brer Rabbit' stories from the African-American oral tradition. Life Education: 1848–1862 Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1848 to Mary Ann Harris, an Irish immigrant. His father, whose identity remains unknown, abandoned Mary Ann shortly afte ...
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John Miles Foley
John Miles Foley (January 22, 1947 – May 3, 2012) was a scholar of comparative oral tradition, particularly medieval and Old English literature, Homer and Serbian epic. He was the founder of the academic journal ''Oral Tradition'' and the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri, where he was Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English and W. H. Byler Endowed Chair in the Humanities. Education Foley was born January 22, 1947, in Northampton, Massachusetts. He received his bachelor's degree at Colgate University in 1969, with majors in Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry. He completed his master's in English Literature at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst in 1971 before completing the Ph.D. there in English and Comparative Literature (1974). Career Following his doctoral studies, Foley undertook fieldwork in Yugoslavia, confirming and extending prior research on living oral traditions by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Based on this fie ...
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William R
William is a masculine given name of Germanic origin. It became popular in England after the Norman conquest in 1066,All Things William"Meaning & Origin of the Name"/ref> and remained so throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. It is sometimes abbreviated "Wm." Shortened familiar versions in English include Will or Wil, Wills, Willy, Willie, Bill, Billie, and Billy. A common Irish form is Liam. Scottish diminutives include Wull, Willie or Wullie (as in Oor Wullie). Female forms include Willa, Willemina, Wilma and Wilhelmina. Etymology William is related to the German given name ''Wilhelm''. Both ultimately descend from Proto-Germanic ''*Wiljahelmaz'', with a direct cognate also in the Old Norse name ''Vilhjalmr'' and a West Germanic borrowing into Medieval Latin ''Willelmus''. The Proto-Germanic name is a compound of *''wiljô'' "will, wish, desire" and *''helmaz'' "helm, helmet".Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxfor ...
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Ella Deloria
Ella Cara Deloria (January 31, 1889 – February 12, 1971), also called Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ ("Beautiful Day Woman"), was a Yankton Dakota educator, anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist. She recorded Native American oral history and contributed to the study of Native American languages. According to Cotera (2008), Deloria was "a pre-eminent expert on Dakota/Lakota/Nakota cultural, religious, and linguistic practices." In the 1940s, Deloria wrote the novel '' Waterlily,'' which was published in 1988 and republished in 2009. Life Deloria was born in 1889 in the White Swan district of the Yankton Indian Reservation, South Dakota. Her parents were Mary (Miriam) Sully Bordeaux Deloria and Philip Joseph Deloria and had Yankton Dakota, English, French and German roots; the family surname goes back to a French trapper ancestor named Francois-Xavier Des Lauriers. Her father was one of the first Dakota to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. Her mother was the daughter of Alf ...
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Linda Dégh
Linda Dégh (18 March 1918 – 19 August 2014) was a folklorist and professor of Folklore & Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, USA. Dégh was born in Budapest, Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ... and is well known as a folklorist for her work with legends, identity, and both rural and urban communities in Europe and North America. In 2004, as professor emerita at Indiana University, she was awarded the AFS Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award. Dégh also served as president of the American Folklore Society in 1982. Personal Dégh was born in Budapest, Hungary, on March 18, 1920 and died in Indiana on August 19, 2014. She was married to Andrew Vázsonyi (1906–1986) for 28 years. Career Linda Dégh earned her degree from Péter Pázmány Universit ...
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Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan Harold Brunvand (born March 23, 1933) is an American retired folklorist, researcher, writer, public speaker, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah. Brunvand is best known for popularizing the concept of the urban legend, a form of modern folklore or story telling. Urban legends are "too good to be true" stories that travel by word of mouth, by print, or by the internet and are attributed to an FOAF: friend of a friend. "Urban legends," Brunvand says, "have a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible and they have a moral." Though criticized for the "popular" rather than "academic" orientation of his books, ''The Vanishing Hitchhiker'' and others, Brunvand felt that it was a "natural and worthwhile part of his job as a folklorist to communicate the results of his research to the public." For his lifetime dedication to the field of folklore, which included radio and television appearances, a s ...
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Ben Botkin
Benjamin Albert Botkin (February 7, 1901 – July 30, 1975) was an American folklorist and scholar. Early life Botkin was born on February 7, 1901, in East Boston, Massachusetts, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He attended the English High School of Boston and then studied at Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1920 with a B.A. in English. He earned his M.A. in English at Columbia University a year later in 1921, and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1931, where he studied under Louise Pound and William Duncan Strong. Career Botkin taught at the University of Oklahoma in the early 1920s and married Gertrude Fritz in 1925. He edited the annual ''Folk-Say'' from 1929 to 1932 and a little magazine, ''Space'', from 1934 to 1935. Contributors to ''Folk-Say'' included Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Henry Roth, J. Frank Dobie, Louise Pound, Alexander Haggerty Krappe, Stanley Vestal, Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, Paul Horgan, and M ...
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