Oral Tradition Volume 7, Number 1March 1992

About the Authors

Paul Sorrell

A specialist in Anglo-Saxon poetry, Paul Sorrell received his doctoral degree from Cambridge University, where he wrote on “Studies in the Treatment of Theme and Its Sources in Some Old English Narrative Poems.” He is now a member of the Department of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Joseph Sobol

Joseph Sobol is Coordinator of the Storytelling Graduate Program at East Tennessee State University. He is a co-founder and co-editor of Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies. His most recent book, The House Between Earth and Sky: Harvesting New American Folktales, was published in 2005.

Joan N. Radner

Joan Radner teaches in the Department of Literature at The American University. Her prime interests fall in areas shared by folklore and literature: storytelling, folklore and literary theory, Irish verbal arts, and women's studies.

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.

Lea Olsan

Lea Olsan is Professor of English and Foreign Languages at Northeast Louisiana University. She has recently written articles for the Encyclopedia of Medieval Folklore ("Medicine") and for Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia ("Magic").

Thomas A. McKean

Thomas A. McKean, a Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, specializes in the Scots and Gaelic song traditions of Scotland. His publications include Hebridean Song-Maker: Iain Macneacail of the Isle of Skye (1997) and articles on various aspects of Scottish tradition.

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.

Willi Erzgräber

Willi Erzgräber is Professor of English Literature in the Englisches Seminar at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, Germany, where he also co-directs the Sonderforschungsbereich on Orality and Literacy, a multi-departmental research consortium. Professor Erzgräber has published widely on British literature of all periods, with special emphasis on modernism.

Warren S. Walker

Warren Walker's biography is not available.

Carolyn Higbie

Carolyn Higbie is Assistant Professor of Classics at Harvard University. Her publications include a book on Homer's traditional style, Measure and Music: Enjambement and Sentence Structure in the Iliad (1990), and a forthcoming study of identity in Homer.