Center for Folklore Studies

Special Events

Nick Spitzer

Roots to Routes: Conservation and Creolization in American Vernacular Music
Monday, October 12, 2009
4:30 PM
Wexner Center Film Theater
Co-sponsored by CFS and the School of Music

Nick Spitzer, the producer and host of American Routes, is a folklorist and a professor of American studies and communication at Tulane University. Nick specializes in American music and the cultures of the Gulf South, and received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas in 1986 with a dissertation on zydeco music and Afro-French Louisiana. American Routes, which is distributed by American Public Media, reaches nearly a million listeners each week on over 225 stations and XM Satellite Radio. Nick's radio experience goes back to his undergraduate days in the 1970s, when he served first as program director of WXPN-FM at Penn in Philadelphia. Since then he has served as founding director of the Louisiana Folklife Program, Lousiana State Folklorist, senior folklife specialist at the Smithsonian Institution, artistic director for the Folk Masters concert/broadcasts from Carnegie Hall and Wolf Trap , and the Independence Day concerts broadcast live on NPR from the National Mall. Spitzer directed the film Zydeco: Creole Music and Culture in Rural Louisiana (1986), and has produced or annotated two dozen documentary sound recordings. Co-author of Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (2006), Nick has received the American Folklore Society's Benjamin Botkin Lifetime Award in Public Folklore, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Excellence in Broadcasting Award, and the New Orleans Mayor's Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award. In 2006 he was named Louisiana Humanist of the Year for cultural recovery efforts after the catastrophe.

This event is the third and final presentation in the series RACE AND MEMORY IN AMERICAN VERNACULAR MUSIC, which also featured Patrick B. Mullen and Robert Cantwell. Nick Spitzer's presentation is supported by the Ohio Humanities Council.

Download Flyer [PDF]

Alumnus Book Lunch: Mickey Weems

Friday, November 6, 2009
12:00 Noon
Dulles 308
After the Dissertation is Done: Publication 101

Mickey Weems (PhD OSU 2007), will talk about his book The Fierce Tribe: Masculine Identity and Performance in the Circuit (Utah State University Press, 2008). He'll also tell us how he worked so efficiently to convert his dissertation into a publishable manuscript, and what happens when your book comes out just before an economic meltdown. This is a brown bag event--bring your own lunch.

Laurel Kendall

Changing Patterns of Korean Shamanism
Thursday, November 19, 2009
4:00 PM
Wexner Center Film/Video Theater

Laurel Kendall is Curator of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her studies of religion, narrative, and gender in east and southeast Asia include The Life and Hard Times of a Koran Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales (1988), Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality and Modernity (1996), and Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit (2003). Her current work concerns the role of material goods in ritual transactions with gods and ancestors. The giving of things to spirits is possibly the most troubling aspect of popular religion for modern rationalists. By interpreting what people do during contemporary shamanic rituals and what clients, shamans, and spirits speaking through shamans have to say about them, she documents how Koreans' use of offerings and ritual props lets them express and dramatize the tangled emotions inherent in a lived history of rapid social transformation and unprecedented material possibility. This event is organized by the Korean Studies Initiative and cosponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion.

Winter Warm-up Dinner Lecture

Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla
Thursday, January 21, 2010
5:30 PM
Mershon Center, room 120 (1501 Neil Avenue)
Studying Material Culture Today

Tradition in Clay: Southern Pots Today

Widely known in folklore circles, Henry Glassie is Professor Emeritus of Folklore at Indian University. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as co-director of Turkish Studies at IU and as an affiliate faculty in American Studies, Central Eurasian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, India Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. His work and many publications forcus on folk art and material culture; historical approaches to the study of folk culture,and material culture studies of the United States, Ireland, Turkey, and Bangladesh.
The Art of Dress in Modern India
Pravina Shukla is Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington. She received her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1998. Dr. Shukla has served as Interim Director of Undergraduate Studies, 2008-2009; as adjunct faculty in Anthropology, the India Studies Program, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; in addition, she is associate curator, Mathers Museum of World Cultures. Her areas of focus include folk art and material culture; body art; dress and costume; museum studies; food art and culture; India and Brazil.

Tom Mould

Sharing the Sacred: The Paradox of Revelation in Contemporary Mormon Culture
January 28, 2010
3:30 PM
Denney 311

Personal revelation is a cornerstone of the Mormon faith. All faithful members can expect to receive revelation from the Holy Ghost in both their spiritual and temporal lives. Yet despite the centrality of revelation, contemporary Mormons must navigate a complex web of competing religious and social norms in the act of sharing these revelations. In this talk, Mould will explore these various norms with particular attention to the narrative strategies people use to edify their fellow church members on the one hand, and preserve the sacred on the other.

Tom Mould is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Elon University and director of PERCS, Elon's Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies. He is the author of two books on Choctaw narrative—Choctaw Prophecy: A Legacy of the Future and Choctaw Tales—and has published on issues of generic boundaries and constructed identities, particularly in the study of oral narrative. He has also produced numerous video documentaries for public television on folk art and culture in Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina. His current research explores prophecy and revelation among Latter-day Saints.

Eric Mortensen

A Naxi Religious Postmortem: On the Death of Ritual Efficacy
Friday, February 12, 2010
Time and location TBA

Eric D. Mortensen (Ph.D., Committee on Inner Asian & Altaic Studies, Harvard University) teaches East Asian and Comparative Religion at Guilford College in North Carolina. His current work focuses primarily on the folkloric and religious aspects of the pictographic textual tradition of the Naxi of Southwest China, including divination, the interface between the written and the oral, and the role of animals in the Naxi tradition. As a comparativist, his work investigates the patterns of religion and folklore in the region of the eastern Himalaya, where he has spent many years and many summers over the past eighteen years living and working with Tibetan nomads and Naxi communities in Yunnan, Sichuan, and the Tibetan Autonomous Region, in the People's Republic of China.

Folklore, History, and Memory: Ireland and Beyond

A workshop featuring Guy Beiner
February 18-19, 2010
311 Denney Hall

Guy Beiner (PhD, National University of Ireland) is Lecturer in Modern History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. His prizewinning first book, Remembering 'The Year of the French': Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Wisconsin, 2007) has been called "the most important monograph on Irish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be published in recent years" (Matthew Kelly, English Historical Review). His current book project is provisionally entitled Ambiguous Memories: Forgetting and Remembering "The Turnout" in Ulster.


A Conversation with Guy Beiner

Thursday, February 18th, 3:30-5:30 PM

Symposium

Friday, February 19, 9:00 AM-4:00 PM

Keynote speaker Guy Beiner. Other presenters include Ray Cashman and the students from his course Comparative Studies 677.02, "Folklore, History, and Memory."

All students, faculty, and interested others are welcome to attend the symposium. The Thursday conversation is restricted to students (any level, any department). Graduate students in English may sign up for the two-day event in order to fulfill the department's Graduate Workshop requirement. To receive the readings for the Thursday discussion or for further information, contact Professor Ray Cashman at cashman.10@osu.edu.

Maria Herrera-Sobek

March 1, 2010
3:30 PM
311 Denney Hall

Professor María Herrera-Sobek (Ph.D., UC Los Angeles) is Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Policy and Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she holds the Luis Leal Endowed Chair. A Fellow of the American Folklore Society and former member of the Editorial Board of the Publications of the Modern Language Association, she has published more than a dozen books and 175 articles, among which are distinguished studies of Mexican and Chicano folklore: The Bracero Experience: Elite Lore versus Folklore, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song, and The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis.

Co-sponsored by the Program in Latino/Latina Studies.