Center for Folklore Studies

Special Events

"Through a Folklorist's Camera: Nairobi's Young Men in (Im)Possible Positions"

Dinner Lecture: Mbugua wa-Mungai
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
5:30-8:00 pm
Mershon Center 120, 1501 Neil Avenue

Mbugua wa-Mungai received his PhD in Comparative Folklore at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and teaches at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. Currently, he is at OSU on a yearlong Fulbright grant. Dr. Mungai has published articles on Kenyan popular culture and conceptions of folklore, and is an activist in the Kenyan disability rights movement. While at OSU he'll be working on a book on masculinity and youth subcultures in Nairobi. He examines both the violent criminal Mungiki group and the creativity of matatu bus operators, whose performances fuse nationalist culture, traditional culture, and American hiphop, to elucidate the "crisis-prone" character of male identity in a period of rapid modernization.

Film Showing and Discussion: "Madagascar, Music, and Devotion" by Ron Emoff

Friday, November 7, 2008
11:30 am-1:20 pm
Place: Smith 4012 (174 West 18th Avenue) - Anthropology Commons Room
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.

Ron Emoff is Associate Professor of Music and Anthropology at OSU-Newark. He received the PhD in ethnomusicology from University of Texas at Austin, where he also intensively studied anthropology and critical theory. He has conducted ethnographic research in Madagascar, Southwest Louisiana, and the French Antilles. Some of his current research interests involve the evocation, creation, and sustenance of memory through music, colonialism and postcolonialism, spirituality, musical constructions of self and community, and establishing histories through musical production and reception. Dr. Emoff's research and publication activity has been funded by Fulbright and by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Dr. Emoff has just finished producing a documentary film, "The Presence of the Past, Madagascar, Music, and Devotion," drawn from field videos and recordings made while in Madagascar conducting ethnographic fieldwork. This documentary will be shown and followed by discussion.

Talk and Buffet: Kelly Feltault

Monday, November 17, 2008
5:30-8:30 pm
Denney 311

Public folklorist Kelly Feltault owns and operates her own consulting business, Cultural Crossings, which provides social science research, project management, needs assessments, and program design and evaluation to non-profit and state agencies. She is a doctoral candidate at American University in Washington, D.C., in the Anthropology department's Race, Gender, and Social Justice Program. Her dissertation explores the political ecology of global crabmeat production, connecting Maryland and Thailand's workers and natural resources in a process mediated by transnational food corporations, Thai and U.S. foreign policy, international development and trade regimes, and discourses on race, class, gender, and natural resources.
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Lecture: Ian Gregory Strachan

Wednesday, November 19
3:30-5:00 pm
311 Denney Hall
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"Audacious Bodies, Rebellious Spaces: Junkanoo, Ringplay, and the Politics of Folk Dance in The Bahamas"

Patrick B. Mullen

"They All Go Native On a Saturday Night:" Race and American Vernacular Music, 1947-1957
Monday, January 12, 2009
4:30 pm
Place: Sci & Eng Library 070-090

Patrick B. Mullen is professor emeritus of English and folklore at The Ohio State University. Author of I Heard the Old Fishermen Say: Folklore of the Texas Gulf Coast, Listening to Old Voices: Folklore, Life Stories, and the Elderly, and other books, he has most recently published The Man Who Adores the Negro, Race and American Folklore (University of Illinois Press, 2008). He is currently teaching a course on the poetry of Bob Dylan.

This is the first talk in a series: Race and Memory in American Vernacular Music. Download Flyer [PDF]

The Second Francis L. Utley Lecture: John D. Niles

"War and the Containment of Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: A Problem of Mentalities"
Friday, February 6, 2009
2:30 pm, Science & Engineering Library 090

Initiated last year, the Utley Lecture is a collaboration between CFS and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in honor of the scholar who established both fields of study at Ohio State. It features a scholar working in Utley's footsteps and combining, as Utley did, expertise in folklore and in medieval literature. This year CMRS takes its turn in organizing the lecture and brings us:

Professor John D. Niles received his PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkley in 1972. His research interests include Old and Middle English Language and Literature, comparative medieval literature, comparative folklore and mythology, and oral literature and the workings of oral tradition. His publications include Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (1983), Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (1999), Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts (2006), and Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (2006). His has published numerous articles and edited a number of volumes on literature and culture. He says, "I like to test all truths, especially the ones that I used to find acceptable. Anthropological approaches to literature are my specialty, but sometimes literature has to resist any 'approach'....I am interested not only in what we know but in how we think we know it, and it the history of that enterprise."

Mirrors and Compasses: An 85th Birthday Symposium for Erika Bourguignon

Friday, February 20, 2009
9:00 am-5:00 pm
Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Avenue

Organized by the Center for Folklore Studies, with support from the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Center for the Study of Religion, the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the School of Music and the Religious Studies Roundtable.

Introduction: Erika Bourguignon's Trajectory

Melinda Kanner, Anthropology, University of Houston

Vienna 1938 and its Aftermaths: Experience and Memory

Chair: Helen Fehervary

A conversation between Erika Bourguignon and Egon Schwarz, Rosa May Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Washington University of St. Louis

Altered States, Gender, and Religious Experience

Chair: Sarah Iles Johnston
Speaker: Thomas J. Csordas, Anthropology, University of California at San Diego
Respondent: Lindsay Jones, Comparative Studies, OSU

Art, Anthropology, and the African Diaspora

Chair: Amy Shuman
Speaker: John Szwed, John M. Musser Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Yale; Music and Jazz Studies, Columbia
Respondent: John W. Roberts, Professor and Dean of Arts and Humanities, OSU

Download Flyer [PDF]

Workshop: The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions

Friday, March 6, 2009
9:00 am-5:00 pm
Knight House

A collaboration with the Program in Folklore, University of California at Berkeley

Brown Bag Talk: Evangelos Avdikos, "Memory and Identity on the Greek-Bulgarian Border"

Tuesday, March 31
Dulles 308
12:00-1:30 PM

Professor Evangelos Avdikos is Head of the Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly. He will visit OSU from March 4th to April 7th, 2009. Professor Avdikos directs a program with a strong profile in oral history and has published studies of rural change and regional identity in Greece as well as on the memories of ethnic Greek refugees from the former Soviet Union. In addition, he works on the uses of traditional narrative in education and on the cultural integration of Roma children in Greek schools.

African American Quilting Traditions: With Pat Turner and Carolyn Mazloomi

Thursday, April 2, 2009
5:30 pm
Urban Arts Space, 50 W. Town Street (in the former Lazarus Building)

Two renowned quilt scholars together for one evening! Hear Patricia A. Turner, professor of African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis, whose just-released (January 2009) book Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters focuses on the cultural history of African American quilts and on the lives of nine quilters. She is joined by Carolyn Mazloomi, well known Cincinnati-based artist, curator and historian, and author of Spirit of the Cloth, which was voted "Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year" award by the American Library Association.
Pat Turner, also well known for her scholarship on rumor and urban legend, will be one of several distinguished folklorists visiting Columbus for the American Folklore Society Executive Board Meeting, April 2-4.

Download the Flyer [PDF]

Presentation and Brown Bag Conversation: Carl Lindahl, "Origin as Essence in American Discourses of the Folk"

Monday, April 6
Denney 311
Presentation: 9:30-11:18 AM
Conversation: 11:30 AM-1:00 PM

Drawing on examples from Cajun Mardi Gras and Appalachian music and folktales, Professor Lindahl will talk about how both "folk" and folklorists construct origin narratives for their traditions and why these often diverge from the available historical evidence.

Carl Lindahl (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Martha Gano Houstoun Research Professor of English at the University of Houston. Lindahl is an internationally recognized authority on folktales, medieval folklore, festival, fieldwork, and Southern and Francophone U.S. folk cultures. Among his numerous books are Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana and American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress. Since 2005, Lindahl has co-directed Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston, the first large-scale oral history project in which the survivors of a major disaster have taken the lead in documenting it.

"Just Floating in the Air: The Dance of Rumor and Science in Ohio's Chemical Valley"

Lecture: Mary Hufford
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
4:30-6:00 pm, Mershon Center, 1501 Neil Avenue

Mary Hufford is former director of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania and Folklife Specialist at the Library of Congress. She has published widely on folklore, cultural policy, and ecological crisis, including an edited volume, Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on place, narrative, and the production of social imaginaries in southern New Jersey (Chaseworld: Foxhunting and Storytelling in New Jersey's Pine Barrens), central Appalachia (with a series of articles and websites on the impact of mountaintop removal mining), and most recently in Washington County, Ohio.

Following the talk, the Folklore Students Association is hosting a conversation with Dr. Hufford about community collaborations in fieldwork. Pizza will be served. RSVP to Elo-Hanna Seljamaa [seljamaa.1@osu.edu]

The Race in Culture: Ethnology & Empire

Friday-Saturday, May 1-2, 2009
Time: TBA
Mershon Center for International Security Studies

Organized by Alice L. Conklin (History) and Dorothy Noyes (English)

Robert Cantwell

"Twang: Striking the Southern Note"
Monday, May 11, 2009
4:30 pm
Place: Sci & Eng Library 070-090

Robert Cantwell is Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He has received NEA, ACLS, and Guggenheim fellowships, the ACLS-Deems Taylor Award for Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (U. of Illinois, 1984) and also has written Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture (Chapel Hill, 1993), When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard, 1996), and the just-published If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture (Illinois, 2008).

This is the second talk in a series: Race and Memory in American Vernacular Music. Download Flyer [PDF]

Nick Spitzer

"Roots to Routes: Conservation and Creolization in American Vernacular Music"
Monday, October 12, 2009
Place: TBA

Best known to the public as the producer of the NPR series "American Routes," Nick Spitzer is Professor of Communication and American Studies at Tulane University. A folklorist specializing in American music and cultures of the Gulf South, Spitzer holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Texas and has served as program director of WXPN-FM (Philadelphia), Louisiana State Folklorist, artistic director of the Folk Masters series as Carnegie Hall, and adjunct professor of urban studies at the University of New Orleans. In 2006 he was named Louisiana Humanist of the Year for his role in post-Katrina cultural recovery, and made a Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

This is the third talk in a series: Race and Memory in American Vernacular Music. Download Flyer [PDF]