Oral Tradition Volume 6, Number 1January 1991

About the Authors

William Sayers

William D. Sayers has written extensively on ancient and modern Irish literature and has published a number of comparative studies in which he explores the influences of Old Norse, Latin, and Old French literatures on that of Old Irish.

Jeffrey Alan Mazo

Jeffrey Alan Mazo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Folklore and Mythology Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published an essay on myth and cultural change in medieval Scandinavia and has two entries forthcoming in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia.

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.

Svetozar Koljević

Equally conversant with modern British and his native South Slavic literature, Svetozar Koljević is Professor at the University of Sarajevo. His study The Epic in the Making (Oxford, 1980) provides the best English-language guide to the literary history of the South Slavic epic.

Ruth Finnegan

Born in Northern Ireland in 1933, Ruth Finnegan studied classics at Oxford, followed by social anthropology, then fieldwork and university teaching in Africa. In 1969 she joined the Open University where she is now Emeritus Professor. Her books include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977/1992), Literacy and Orality (1988), Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (1992), South Pacific Oral Traditions (joint ed., 1995), Communicating (2002), and The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (2007).

Carol Dougherty

Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin at Wellesley College, Carol Dougherty is especially interested in issues of cultural history. She is currently authoring a book entitled The Poetics of Colonization.

Ryan Bishop

Ryan Bishop is completing his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he also teaches English at the University of St. Thomas. In addition to his publications on academic subjects, Mr. Bishop publishes fiction. He was a Fulbright lecturer in English and literature in Yugoslavia in 1987 and 1988.