Oral Tradition Volume 18, Number 2

About the Authors

Samuel G. Armistead

Samuel G. Armistead is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Classics at the University of California at Davis. He has published widely (some twenty-five book-length publications, together with several hundred articles) on medieval Spanish literature, modern Hispanic oral literature, and comparative literature.

Marcia Farr

Marcia Farr is Professor of Education and English at Ohio State University. Her recent work includes explorations of oral language and literacy within Mexican families in Chicago and Mexico, and an edited book, Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City’s Neighborhoods (2003).

Isabel Cardigos

Isabel Cardigos is founder and director of a center for oral literature (Centro de Estudos Ataide Oliveira) at the University of Algarve. She is the co-director of its yearly journal, Estudos de Literatura Oral (Studies in Oral Literature). She has recently written the entries on “Portugal” and “Shoes” for the Enzyklopädie des Märchens.

J. J. Dias Marques

J. J. Dias Marques has been studying Portuguese oral tradition for over twenty years, concentrating on the ballad. He teaches oral literature at the University of Algarve and is assistant editor of the journal Estudos de Literatura Oral.

Carlos Nogueira

Carlos Nogueira holds an M.A. in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from the University of Porto, where he is currently working on his Ph.D. in Portuguese literature and studying satire in Portuguese poetry. His publications include the Popular Song-Book of Baião (2 vols., 1996, 2002) and the Narrative Song-Book of Baião (2003).

J. M. Pedrosa

J. M. Pedrosa is Professor of the Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Alcalá, Madrid. He has authored more than 20 books (including his latest, Bestiario: Antropología y simbolismo animal [2002]) and some 200 articles; he carries on research in Spain, Latin America, and Central Africa.

Suzanne H. Petersen

Suzanne H. Petersen, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Washington, works on the pan-Hispanic traditional ballad and the poetics of orally transmitted poetry. Her interactive bibliographical and textual databases and music archives are updated monthly and published online at depts.washington.edu/hisprom/.

John Zemke

John Zemke is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages, University of Missouri, Columbia. He has published on medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature and is currently editing Hebrew letter Spanish manuscripts. His forthcoming book is Moses ben Baruch Almosnino, Regimiento de la vida and Tratado de los suenyos (Constantinople, 1564) (2004).

Mary-Ann Constantine

Mary-Ann Constantine directs the Iolo Morganwg Project at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth, where she is studying Romantic literary forgery. Her Breton Ballads (1996) won the Katharine Briggs Award for Folklore in 1996, and, with Gerald Porter, she has recently published Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song (2003).

Sioned Davies

Sioned Davies, Professor of Welsh at Cardiff University, has published extensively on medieval storytelling as reflected in the tales of the Mabinogion. Her current project, “Performing from the Pulpit,” examines the dramatic preaching of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wales.

Dafydd Johnston

Dafydd Johnston is Professor of Welsh at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is a specialist in medieval Welsh poetry, and is currently leading a project to produce a new edition of the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym in electronic format. His publications include The Literature of Wales (1994) and A Guide to Welsh Literature (1998).

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).

Michael Chesnutt

Michael Chesnutt is Professor of medieval and folklore studies at the Arnamagnaean Institute, University of Copenhagen. His recent publications include the final volume of the Faroese ballad corpus and a major study of medieval Danish liturgy.

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.

Stephen Mitchell

Stephen Mitchell, Professor of Scandinavian and Folklore at Harvard University, writes on performance, magic, and witchcraft as well as the Old Icelandic sagas and related forms, as evidenced by his Heroic Sagas and Ballads (1991). He is also curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and co-editor of its publication series.

Gísli Sigurðsson

Gísli Sigur∂sson is Professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland. His publications focus on oral tradition and orally derived medieval texts as well as folktales and folklore of more recent times. His books include Gaelic Influence in Iceland (1988, reissued 2000), Eddukvæ∂i (1998), and The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method (forthcoming in English).

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).

Robert Payson Creed

Robert Payson Creed is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published widely on Beowulf and comparative oral traditions, including Old English Poetry: Fifteen Essays (1967) and Reconstructing the Rhythm of Beowulf (1990).

Lori Ann Garner

Lori Ann Garner, Lecturer in the English Department at University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, has published articles on medieval literature and oral traditions in Neophilologus, Studia Neophilologica, and Western Folklore. She has also contributed to the volumes Teaching Oral Traditions (1998) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (forthcoming).

Heather Maring

Heather Maring is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she is writing two dissertations—a companion to two medieval dream-visions and a manuscript of her own poems. She serves as an editorial assistant at Oral Tradition.

John D. Niles

John D. Niles is Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a specialist in Beowulf and other Old English poetry, and his most recent book is Homo Narrans (1999).

Andy Orchard

Andy Orchard is Associate Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (1994) and Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript (1995).

Sabir Badalkhan

Sabir Badalkhan, Ph.D. in folklore (“Minstrelsy Tradition in Balochistan,” Naples, 1994), teaches at the University of Naples. His research interests include oral tradition in Balochistan (both in Pakistan and Iran); itinerant musicians, singers, and storytellers in southwest Asia; and the presence of African musical culture in Pakistan. He has published widely on Balochi oral traditions, and among his articles are “The Changing Contents of Baloch Women’s Songs” and “An Introduction to the Performance of Verbal Art in Balochistan.”

Mark Bender

Mark Bender is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. His interests include oral poetry and the folklore of ethnic groups in southern and northeastern China and East Asia. His latest book is Plum and Bamboo: China’s Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (2003).

Naran Bilik

Naran Bilik is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociocultural Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Bernstein Visiting Professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology (2003-06) at Carleton College. He is interested in semiotic approaches to ethnicity and politico-cultural boundaries.

Chan Park

Chan E. Park is Associate Professor of Korean language, literature, and performance studies at Ohio State University. She researches p’ansori, Korean story-singing, related oral narrative/lyrical/dramatic traditions, and their place in the shaping of modern Korean drama. Among her publications is Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story-Singing (2003).

Olga Merck Davidson

Olga Merck Davidson is Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. She has published numerous studies on Persian and Iranian oral tradition, including Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (1994) and more recently Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry (2000).

Karl Reichl

Karl Reichl is Professor of English philology at the University of Bonn. He is the author of books on Middle English literature, English word-formation, and Turkic oral epic poetry, including Singing the Past (2000) and a German translation of the Uzbek heroic epic Alpamish (2001). He is at present preparing a performance-oriented edition of the repertoire of a Karakalpak oral epic singer from Uzbekistan.

Maria V. Stanyukovich

Maria V. Stanyukovich is Senior Researcher at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), St. Petersburg, Lecturer at St. Petersburg State University, and a member of the Coordinating Board of the Center for the Study of Epic Traditions, Russia. In addition to her research on Philippine oral epics and shamanism in the Philippines, she has conducted fieldwork in Cuba, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia.

Robert Cochran

Robert Cochran is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, where he chairs the American Studies program and directs the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies. His latest book is Come Walk With Me (2004); his survey of Arkansas music, Our Own Sweet Sounds, will be published in 2005. He is currently at work on a biography of Nebraska folklorist Louise Pound.

Thomas A. DuBois

Thomas A. DuBois is Professor of Scandinavian studies and folklore at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his books are Finnish Folk Poetry and the Kalevala (1995), Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (1999), and Finnish Folklore (2000), the last co-authored with Leea Virtanen.

Edward R. Haymes

Edward R. Haymes teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at Cleveland State University. He has published on Middle High German epic, Old Norse poetry and prose, and Richard Wagner. His most recent book is Das Nibelungenlied: Geschichte und Interpretation (1999).

Joshua T. Katz

Joshua T. Katz is Assistant Professor of Classics and a member of the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University. Widely published in Indo-European historical, comparative linguistics, his current research focuses on words pertaining to animals.

Della Pollock

Della Pollock, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Telling Bodies Performing Birth (1999) and editor of Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History (1998). Her research interests include the politics of performance and the performance of everyday narrative.

Burton Raffel

Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His most recent books are a fully annotated edition of Hamlet (2003), the first in a series of such editions from Yale University Press, and a new translation of Stendahl’s The Red and the Black (2003).

William Schneider

William Schneider, Curator of Oral History and Associate in Anthropology at the Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks, introduced oral history “jukeboxes,” interactive, multimedia computer files that present and cross-reference oral history and related photos and maps. He has edited Kusiq: An Eskimo Life History from the Arctic Coast of Alaska (1991) and written So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History (2002).

Mary Ellen Brown

Mary Ellen Brown, Professor of Folklore at the University of Indiana, is the editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. Her research interests in folklore include “all things Scottish,” as evidenced by numerous articles in that area and by her 1984 book on Burns and Tradition.

William Bernard McCarthy

William Bernard McCarthy, author of The Ballad Matrix (1990), teaches English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. He is currently editing a survey collection of United States folk tales.

Thomas Pettitt

Thomas Pettitt is Associate Professor at the Institute for Literature, Culture, and Media Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, with teaching and research interests centering on early literature, theater, and related “folk” traditions. His most recent articles appear in Medieval English Theatre and European Medieval Drama.