Center for Folklore Studies

News and Announcements

For upcoming events and for information on the Center's activities and folklore programs at Ohio State, please see the Center's Calendar of Events. If you would like to post special folklore news or events for the OSU folklore community, please send your requests to post to Barbara Lloyd at Lloyd.123@osu.edu.

For timely e-mail reminders of Center activities and special announcements, sign up on FOLKSERV, the listserv of the Center for Folklore Studies. To join, send an email message to: listproc@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu. Leave the subject line blank. In the body of the message, type: Subscribe folkserv YourFirstname YourLastname

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Kudos to OSU Folklorists

To our own Maria Teresa Agozzino, soon alas no longer to be our own but Assistant Professor in the Department of Folklore and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University. Prior to taking up this position she'll be leaving us to work on the Smithsonian Folklore Festival's 2009 Welsh project. We hope she'll be visiting us often.

For a dissertation converted to a book in record time: Mickey Weems, The Fierce Tribe: Masculine Identity and Performance in the Circuit. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008. http://www.usu.edu/usupress/books/index.cfm?isbn=6912

To the prolific Prof. Ray Cashman for his "Visions of Irish Nationalism." Journal of Folklore Research 45/3:361-381. And for "Storytelling and the Construction of Local Identities on the Irish Border." Anáil an Bhéil Beho: Orality and Modern Irish Culture. Ed. Nessa Cronin, Seán Crosson, and John Eastlake. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2009. 115-125.
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Anail-an-Bheil-Bheo--Orality-and-Modern-Irish-Culture1-4438-0152-6.htm

To John Moe for a Norwegian Marshall Scholar Grant for 2008-2009 to support research on Norwegian emigration and translations of "letters home" from the collection of the Norsk Utvandrermuseum.

To Elo-Hanna Seljamaa for winning a Dr. Gordon P.K. Chu Memorial Scholarship, which will help to defray her expenses for summer fieldwork on interethnic relations and urban iconography in Tallinn, Estonia.

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Metro School to offer Folklore Course

Folklorist Martha Sims will be teaching an Introduction to Folklore course at Columbus, Ohio's recently established Metro High School. The school is a small, intellectually vibrant public school option open to 9th through 12th graders in Franklin County who are focused on pursuing a college career.

The English 270: Introduction to Folklore course will introduce students to basic concepts of folklore and methods for studying and interpreting folklore (past and present). Students will examine verbal, behavioral, and material expressions of cultures and communities, looking at how folklore is created, re-invented, and made meaningful within particular folk groups. Those groups may be recognizable to "outsiders" in some way-such as occupational, religious, or ethnic groups-or they may be groups whose borders are less visible to outsiders. The course will take a special look at folk art and material culture, including exploring the work and cultural context of several Ohio folk artists (again, past and present).

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Presidential Fellowship

Kudos to Jason Bush, who has just gotten back from fieldwork in Peru to learn of his Presidential Fellowship! Jason is working with Katey Borland and Lesley Ferris; he follows on other folklore students including Eric Shepherd and Terry Schoone-Jongen in winning this honor from the university.

And Terry's dissertation, by the way, has just been published: The Dutch-American Identity: Staging Memory and Ethnicity in Community Celebrations, from Cambria Press.

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The Department of African American and African Studies Community Extension Center, College of Arts and Humanities Diversity Committee, Project Narrative, Center for Folklore Studies, Department of English, Department of Comparative Studies, and Literacy Studies presents

Sugar

Friday, March 13, 7-9:00 pm
Department of African American and African Studies Community Extension Center, 905 Mount Vernon Avenue.
Robbie McCauley's Sugar brings together storytelling, social commentary, and interactive dialogue on the subject of diabetes and health care disparities. She plays sugar as a metaphor and a reality related to race, class, gender, and health. Both poignant and humorous, the performance reflects her work in residence at The Ohio State University and with local Columbus groups active in the education and care for individuals and families with diabetes. Her stories target how the body both holds memory and is a source of transformation. "Not a scientist," says Ms. McCauley, "I am more interested in questions of truth, love and beauty. How might we transform the seduction and decay of sugar in this life, and still have some sweetness?"

ALSO

Brown-bag Lunch Discussion on Participatory Theater, Storytelling, and Social action

Friday, March 13, noon-1:30 pm
311 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th Avenue
Robbie McCauley will lead a brown-bag lunch discussion on participatory theater, storytelling, and social action. If you would like to become more familiar with Ms. McCauley's work prior to this discussion, suggested readings include:
Contact Sheila Bock at 614-203-1256 or bock.42@osu.edu for copies of these readings and to RSVP.

Robbie McCauley is Professor of Performing Arts Department at Emerson College in Boston. She is an OBIE Award playwright for Sally's Rape, and a nationally recognized performance artist and director. Directing credits include the premier of Daniel Alexander Jones' BEL CANTO co- produced with The Theater Offensive and Wheelock Family Theater, which she also directed at the 2000 Sundance Theater Lab; and Kamal Sinclair Steele's Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome at the New Federal Theater in New York City. Her recent acting credits include Circle of Time by Shirley Timmerck at Boston's Lyric Theater. She is widely anthologized including Extreme Exposure by Jo Bonney, ed. and Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, Sydne Mahone, ed.. Her performance of Sugar is the center of an extended community residency at The Ohio State University in 2006.

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Congratulations Amy!

Amy Shuman has been elected to the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society, where she will serve a three-year term, 2009-2011. Congratulations to Amy, who will represent us well!

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2008-2009 Collaborative Conference

We are happy to announce the 2008-2009 collaborative conference, "Public and Private," March 27-28, 2009, Produced by the Indiana University Folklore & Ethnomusicology Student Associations and The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association. This conference aims to create a space for graduate and undergraduate students to share their research in folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, material culture, performance studies, and related disciplines, as it relates to the study of academic and vernacular interpretation of everyday life.

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Community Health and Vernacular Health Systems Panel

During July 2008 the American Folklore Society will be convening a group of folklorists with extensive experience in health care policy to prepare a set of case studies demonstrating the ways in which folklorists can make unique and important contributions to the creation, implementation, and evaluation of public policy in the health care fields.

Interested students, faculty, and others are welcome to attend a panel discussion that will be held:

Monday, July 21, 2008
3:30 - 4:30pm
Room 165 Davis Heart & Lung Research Institute
473 W. 12th Ave

David Hufford, recently retired from the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, will lead the group; its members will be Erika Brady of Western Kentucky University, Mariana Chilton of the Drexel University School of Public Health, Diane Goldstein of the Folklore Department of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Michael Owen Jones of the UCLA Folklore Program, and Bonnie O'Connor of the Brown University Medical School Department of Pediatrics.

While here, the group will make a presentation at the OSU medical school on folklore and community health. We've attached a PDF of the announcement of this event [PDF], and we hope to see you there.

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Kudos to Amy Shuman

for yet another important book relating to narrative, this time as applied to political asylum cases:

Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century
By Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman

Many nations recognize the moral and legal obligation to accept people fleeing from persecution, but political asylum applicants in the twenty-first century face restrictive policies and cumbersome procedures. So, what counts as persecution? How do applicants translate their stories of suffering and trauma into a narrative acceptable to the immigration officials? How can asylum officials weed out the fake from the genuine without resorting to inappropriate cultural definitions of behavior?

Using both in depth accounts by asylum applicants and interviews with lawyers and others involved, this book takes the reader on a journey through the process of applying for asylum in both the United States and Great Britain. It describes how the systems address the conflicting needs of the state to protect their citizens from terrorists and the influx of hordes of unwelcome economic migrants, while at the same time adhering to their legal, moral and treaty obligations to provide safe haven for those fleeing persecution.

Rejecting Refugees is an insightful and fresh evaluation of the obstacles asylum applicants face and the cultural, procedural, and political discrepancies in the political asylum process. This makes it ideal reading to students and scholars of political science, international relations, sociology, law and anthropology.

Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century

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Congratulations also to CFS staff members

Sheila Bock and Kirsi Haenninen for triumphing over their candidacy exams and advancing to ABD status!

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Newly Approved GIS in Folkore

The Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University is delighted to announce the creation of a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore, approved by the Council on Academic Affairs on September 6th, 2007. This interdisciplinary minor offers a formal credential in folklore to Masters and PhD students in any field. It provides both focus and flexibility for students, balancing core courses with electives that can overlap with the student's degree program. Thirteen departments from four colleges (Humanities, Arts, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Education and Human Ecology) co-sponsor the Folklore G.I.S. See a description of the GIS and its requirements.

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Call for Proposals:
Urban Party Mix: Performing the Americas in the Metropole

The Center for Folklore Studies invites grad students and advanced undergraduates in any relevant discipline to submit proposals for special student sessions attached to its spring colloquium.

Bowen Theatre, Drake Center
February 21-23, 2008

The simultaneous deterritorialization and re-rooting of Latin American and Caribbean forms of celebration within urban centers of Europe and the United States has accentuated their essential hybridity and intensified social and aesthetic transformations in the performing communities. In honor of the Columbus opening of the exhibit "Midnight Robbers: The Artists of Notting Hill Carnival," this colloquium will place the London carnival in conversation with emerging Latin- and LusoAmerican dance scenes in Newark, New Jersey. In both locales the individual and collective identities of performing revelers are changing. As new and diverse groups acquire styles of bodily expression associated with the marginalized Americas, what are the aesthetic, economic, social, and political effects? Come discuss the promise and challenges of hybrid forms among shifting populations.

The colloquium speakers include:

• Barbara Browning, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, New York University (keynote speaker)
• Katherine Borland, Associate Professor of Comparative Studies, OSU-Newark
• Julian Henriques, Filmmaker and Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London
• Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Associate Professor of Portuguese and Lusophone World Studies, Rutgers University-Newark
• Ali Pretty, Artistic Director, Kinetika Arts International, UK
• Ruth Tompsett, Theatre historian and co-director, Carnival Exhibition Group

Call for Student Papers: Graduate and advanced undergrad students in any relevant discipline are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers on performance in transnational settings. (Note: student papers need not fit the stricter parameters of the colloquium.) Student papers will be presented in special Saturday sessions and discussed by visitors Barbara Browning and Julian Henriques. This is a chance to show your research to major scholars in the field.

Interested students should contact Center for Folklore Studies Director Dorothy Noyes at noyes.10@osu.edu as soon as possible; full one-page abstracts for review will be due on November 15.

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Congratulations to Eric Shepherd!

Our recent DEALL PhD and master kuaishu performer Eric Shepherd has just been featured in the government-published English language Beijing newspaper, China Daily. Eric soon begins his new position as Assistant Professor of Chinese at Iowa State University, where we all wish him the very best.

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End of Year Kudos!

1. Our PhDs for 2006-2007:
   
   Selina Lim, Political Science, "Rethinking Albert O. Hirschman's 'Exit, Voice, and Loyalty': The Case of Singapore."
   
   Terry Schoone-Jongen, Theatre (Presidential Fellow), "Tulip Time, U.S.A.: Staging Memory, Identity and Ethnicity in Dutch-American Community Festivals.
   
   Eric Shepherd, East Asian Languages and Literatures (Presidential Fellow), "A Pedagogy of Culture Based on Chinese Storytelling Traditions."
   
   Mickey Weems, Education Policy and Leadership, "The Fierce Tribe: Crack Whores, Body Fascists, and Circuit Queens in the Spiritual Performance of Non-Violent Masculinity."
   
   
2. Another paper prize winner:
   
   Anna Messinger, winner of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2006-07 Kahrl Award for the best undergraduate paper on a medieval topic, for her paper "Half a Loaf and a Tilted Cup: The Diffusion of Hospitality Throughout the Norse Cosmos," written for Professor Merrill Kaplan's SCAN 222: Nordic Mythology and Medieval Culture in Autumn 2006.
   
   
3. Publications
   
   The Ohio Humanities Council is sponsoring a showing of the Smithsonian traveling exhibition "Key Ingredients: America by Food" in various venues throughout the state. The accompanying booklet, Key Ingredients: Ohio by Food features essays by our own Tim Lloyd, Ohio colleagues Howard Sacks and Lucy Long, and other folklorists, as well as a county-based guide to Ohio foodways by OSU folklore students Sheila Bock and Ashley Overstreet, who are featured enjoying local specialties in several of the photographs. For the exhibition sites and to order the booklet, see the OHC Web site.

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Congratulations to Kirsi Haenninen

on her recent publication, "Perspectives on the Narrative Construction of Emotions" [PDF] published in Elore.

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Congratulations to Mickey Weems

who recently successfully defended his dissertation, The Fierce Tribe: Crack Whores, Body Fascists, and Circuit Queens in the Spiritual Performance of Non-Violent Masculinity, thereby completing requirements for his PhD in Educational Policy and Leadership, guided by his co-chairs Sy Kleinman and Bill Taylor.

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Kudos to Ann Ferrell and Andy Paluch

for winning the FSA conference graduate and undergraduate paper prizes respectively. Ann's paper was entitled "Tobacco Farming in Kentucky: A Tradition of Change" and Andy's was "The Reluctant Storyteller: Negotiating Performance and Contextual Ambiguity."

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Jason Bush Wins Mullen Prize

Congratulations to Jason Bush for winning the Patrick Mullen Graduate Student Paper Prize for his project "Danza de la Raza: The Folklorization of the Peruvian Scissors Dance."

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Show and Tell for Peace

Congratulations to Amy Horowitz and Amy Shuman for their successful endeavor "Living Columbus: The Salaam, Shalom, Peace Project," which allowed students from three faith-based schools to host a tour for their peers of other faiths. Read more about the success of this program in the Columbus Dispatch article, "Show and tell for peace, Students play host to peers from other faith-based schools."

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Congratulations to recent BA Taylor Nelms

whom many of you will remember from last year's FSA conference, for becoming the first OSU student to win a Gates-Cambridge Scholarship! Taylor's honors thesis, "Negotiating familial ideals through conversational narrative: relationships of exchange in a Quiteño family" was co-directed by Jeff Cohen and Sabra Webber. Read more about Taylor Nelms' honors thesis.

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Call for Submissions: The Patrick B. Mullen Prize

This is a $200 cash award for the best OSU folklore graduate student paper. For eligibility and format information, see the Patrick B. Mullen Prize section of our Call For Papers page. Papers should be submitted to the Center for Folklore Studies offices, Dulles 308, no later than 2:00 pm on May 1.

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OSU Center for Folklore Studies Folklore Student and Faculty Grants

The Center for Folklore studies has initiated a small grants program for folklore students and faculty. We offers two types of support--for travel and for special programs--described below. Applicants are eligible to receive only one grant per fiscal year (July-June). That is, in any given academic year, an applicant must choose between receiving travel support or special program support. For more information and deadlines, see Funding Opportunities.