Oral Tradition Volume 15, Number 2October 2000

About the Authors

Sybil Thornton

Sybil A. Thornton, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, has published extensively on medieval Jishû (a Japanese Buddhist order), the epic, and Japanese cinema.

Koenraad Kuiper

Koenraad Kuiper teaches linguistics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and has published in the fields of English vernacular oral traditions, morphology, and literary theory. He is the author of Smooth Talkers (1996), and has written on auctioneering, sports announcer talk, checkout operator small talk, weather forecasting, and ritual insult. He has also published three volumes of poetry.

Anna-Leena Siikala

Anna-Leena Siikala, chair of Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki, is currently serving as Academy Professor at the Academy of Finland, where she is conducting a multinational research project entitled “Myth, History and Society: Ethno/Nationalism in the Era of Globalisation.” She also serves as editor-in-chief of both The Encyclopedia of the Uralic Mythologies and Studia Fennica.

Stephan Meyer

Stephan Meyer is currently working on a Ph.D. in philosophical theories of intersubjectivity and collaborative life-writing at Basel University. His publications focus on South African literature and contemporary critical theory. He is currently co-editing Telling lives: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography with Judith Lütge Coullie and Thengani Ngwenya.

Lauri Harvilahti

Lauri Harvilahti is Director of the Institute for Cultural Research and Professor at the Department of Folklore Studies in Helsinki, Finland. His current activities and interests include oral tradition, epics, and Finnish Kalevala poetry. He has also carried out fieldwork in Russia, the Upper Altay in China, India, Bangladesh, and Kenya.

Mark C. Amodio

Mark C. Amodio, Professor of English at Vassar College, is the author of Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England (2004). He has recently co-edited, with Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr. (2003).