Center for Folklore Studies

Conference

Culture Archives and the State: Between Nationalism, Socialism, and the Global Market

The Center for Folklore Studies Spring Colloquium

Biographies

Taj Mohammad Ahmadzada is the General Manager of the Radio Archive, Radio-TV Afghanistan, in Kabul.

Regina Bendix began her studies in Volkskunde, Cultural Anthropology and German Studies in her native Switzerland. In 1980 she moved to Berkeley, CA where she completed a BA in Folklore; she continued graduate studies at Indiana University in Bloomington where she finished her Ph.D. in 1987. After teaching at various institutions in the USA and back in Switzerland, she spent seven years at the University of Pennsylvania, in Folklore and Folklife and Anthropology. In 2001 she accepted the chair of European Ethnology at the University of Goettingen, Germany where she has worked ever since. Her research emphases are in narrative, tourism, heritage and culture, the ethnography of the senses, the history of cultural fields of research and the culture of academia.

Alina Branda is Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Studies, Faculty of European Studies, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj. She received her PhD in the same department, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Utrecht University as well as a teaching fellowship at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College, London. Her research interests include the anthropology of South Eastern Europe, interethnic relations in Transylvania, Transylvanian Jewish communities, and property restitution in Post-Communist Romania.

Roma Chatterji is Reader in the Department of Sociology, Delhi University. Apart from an abiding interest in folklore and the narrative traditions of Bengal she has also worked in medical anthropology and on collective violence and governmentality. She has conducted fieldwork in the Netherlands and in a slum in Mumbai. She is currently engaged in a project on folk art as commodity. She has co-authored Living with Violence. An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life with Deepak Mehta and co-edited a special issue of Domains called "Riot Discourses" also with Deepak Mehta. Her book Genre, Discourse, Locality. Folklore and the Production of Purulia as a Borderzone is to be published this year.

Gao Bingzhong is Professor at the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology at Peking University. From 2002-2006 he was General Secretary of the China Folklore Society, and he is currently its vice-president. He has been a visiting scholar at Berkeley and the University of Hawai’i, and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Intangible Heritage. He has conducted field research in several regions of China on cultural change and ethnic relations in rural communities, and has authored studies of these topics and a folklore textbook, along with many articles on the discipline of folklore and its relationship to political changes.

Lauri Harvilahti is Director of the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society. His current activities and interests include oral tradition, problems of archiving and management of data, epics, and Finnish Kalevala poetry. He has also carried out fieldwork in Finland, Russia, the Upper Altay (Russian Federation), in Mongolia, China, India, Bangladesh, and Kenya.

Renata Jambrešic Kirin is research associate at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb and collaborator with the Centre for Women's Studies, Zagreb. She has been the coordinator of feminist postgraduate courses in Dubrovnik (2004 and the forthcoming 2007 course) as well as the grantee of the Refugee Studies Programme, Oxford University, Central European University in Budapest and the Ohio State University in Columbus. She co-edited two collections of papers: War, Exile, Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives (1996) and Izmedu roda i naroda: etnološke i folkloristicke studije (2003). She has published articles in Croatian and international scientific journals discussing the issues of testimonial literature, gender history and the ethnography of war in Croatia (1991-1995).

Andy Kolovos is the VFC's Archivist and a staff Folklorist. He earned a BA in Literature from Bennington College, and holds an MA in Folklore and an MLS, both from Indiana University. He is currently struggling toward his PhD in Folklore from Indiana. He has worked as an Instructor for the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, a researcher and archivist for Traditional Arts Indiana, a fieldworker for the Polis Center at IUPUI, project assistant for the Folklore volume of the MLA International Bibliography, and the librarian and archivist of the American Society for Psychical Research. His research interests include audio field recording, audio preservation and the history and development of folklore and folklife archives. He maintains the Vermont Folklife Center's Audio Field Recording Equipment Guide.

Margaret Kruesi is Librarian (Cataloger) at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, where her work is focused on making the collections of the Center’s Archive accessible through on-line cataloging and implementing standards for description and access. She participates in the American Folklife Center’s educational outreach initiatives and public programming and serves on the advisory board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus, a current project of the American Folklife Center and the American Folklore Society, to create a controlled vocabulary for ethnomusicology, ethnology, and folklore. She received her Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995.

Dr. Yelena Minyonok is Chief Curator of the Folklore Archive of the Institute of World Literature (Russian Academy of Sciences) in Moscow. Graduated from Moscow State University in 1988. Post-graduate studies at the Institute of World Literature (Moscow, Russia), 1988-1991. She has worked at the Institute of World Literature as a Senior Researcher (Folklore Department) since 1991. Ph.D. in Folklore Studies, an author of 3 books and more then 60 articles. Author and Principal Investigator of the folklore projects "Russian Expedition" and "Music and Folklore of Russian Villages", a project of the Earthwatch Institute. Since 1989 till 2007 a leader of more then 30 folklore expeditions. Currently a visiting professor at the University of Kentucky as a visiting professor in the department of Modern and Classical Languages.

Lorraine Sakata is Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. She served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and Professor of Ethnomusicology until her retirement in 2005. Before joining the UCLA faculty in 1997, she was on the faculty of the University of Washington, School of Music since 1977. She first conducted field research in Afghanistan in 1966-67. Since then she has worked and continues to work in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. She is the author of Music in the Mind: Concepts of Music and Musician in Afghanistan (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002) and numerous publications on the music of these areas. She is currently the P.I. for an NEH grant, "Preserving and Cataloging the Radio Afghanistan Audio Archives."

Cristina Sánchez-Carretero holds a PhD by the University of Pennsylvania in Folklore (2002) and a Master's in Popular Culture by Bowling Green State University (1997). Is currently a researcher at the Department of Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid. She conducted fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and Spain studying the role of narrating in the creation of locality in the diaspora. Currently, she is conducting research on Afro-Dominican Religious Centers in Madrid and their function maintaining transnational families. In addition, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero is the coordinator of a research project that analyzes the collective mourning rituals after the March 11th attacks in Madrid.

Guha Shankar is Folklife Specialist (Public Programs and Research), at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 in Anthropology with a concentration in Folklore and Expressive Culture from the University of Texas at Austin. At the Center, he works with state-based educational institutions at both the high school and university level to provide training in ethnographic research methods and advice regarding curriculum development and project planning. He has extensive experience in producing ethnographic films and his related interests include the use of emerging technologies in documentation, preservation and dissemination, especially collaborative work with cultural communities. These interests have resulted in productions of and participation in scholarly gatherings and field projects that engage such issues as the repatriation of cultural documentation to communities of origin, the role of cultural institutions in promoting a sense of community and archival collections as central to the preservation of political and social memory. His research in Caribbean social history and visual anthropology have resulted in published articles on the intersections of race, nationalism, and cultural politics in the post-colonial Caribbean and the work of filmmaker and anthropologist John Marshall.

Anca Stere is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, Romanian Academy, currently completing a thesis entitled Mechanisms used for Changing the Folkloric Text during the Romanian Postwar Totalitarianism. She holds an MA in Ethnological Studies from the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, with the dissertation Gesture Language in Romanian Charms, and a second MA in South-East European Studies from the Faculty of Art, with the dissertation Ritual, Ceremony, Show in the Folkloric Context of Southeastern Europe. From 2000 to 2007 she was a senior researcher at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore "Constantin Brailoiu", in Bucharest, and in 2005 she was a fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest.

Ergo-Hart Västrik is the director of the Estonian Folklore Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum. He studied Estonian and comparative folklore at the University of Tartu in 1991-1997, defended his MA degree at the same institution in 1999 and is now preparing a PhD on the research history of the small Baltic-Finnic peoples Votians and Izhorians. Main fields of research have concerned folk religion of Baltic-Finnic peoples and the historiography of folklore scholarship. Since 1997 he has conducted fieldwork among Votians and Izhorians. He has contributed to the series "Studies in Folklore and Popular Religion", "Folklore: An Electronic Journal of Folklore", "Estonian Culture" and "Recordings from the Estonian Folklore Archives".