Oral Tradition Volume 1, Number 3

About the Authors

Bruce A. Rosenberg

Professor of American Civilization at Brown University, Bruce Rosenberg has long been a significant force at the intersection of folklore and literature, particularly in medieval studies. His article on Leon Forrest stems from a deep interest in African American oral traditions and folk-preaching, as attested for example by his book Can These Bones Live? (1987).

Ward Parks

Ward Parks, Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, combines interests in medieval English and ancient Greek oral traditional works with a perspective from contemporary critical theory. His Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Old English and Homeric Traditions appeared in 1990.

Alexandra Hennessey Olsen

A member of the English department at the University of Denver, Alexandra Hennessey Olsen has written widely on Old and Middle English literature, particularly on their roots in oral tradition and in Latin literature.

Albert B. Lord

Albert B. Lord (Harvard University, Emeritus) truly needs no introduction for anyone working in the field of oral tradition. His comparative research, especially The Singer of Tales (1960), in effect established the Oral Theory as a method subsequently applied to dozens of different traditions. He is near completion of a sequel to that landmark volume.

Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys

Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys (University of Sydney) often work as a investigations of Byzantine popular poetry, studies which regularly tradition out of which these works emerged. Some of their numerous articles field are gathered together in Popular Literature in Byzantium (1983).

Eliza Miruna Ghil

A native Romanian with scholarly training in the Romance literatures, Eliza Miruna Ghil (University of New Orleans) is well qualified to provide this portrait of Vasile Tetin and to work on the medieval French tradition from a uniquely comparative point of view.

Joseph J. Duggan

Joseph J. Duggan, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California/Berkeley, has made many important contributions to the study of medieval texts with roots in oral tradition, perhaps most notably The Song of Roland: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft (1973) and Oral Literature: Seven Essays (1975). He is editor of Romance Philology.