Folklore Alumni
Former OSU folklore students teach at universities ranging from Penn State to the University of North Carolina to Baskent University in Turkey, and many have pursued public arena work for organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Humanities Council, and CITYFOLK. No matter how many miles separate us, we strive to stay connected, showing how firm alumni friendship is for folklore graduates.If you are a folklore graduate of the Ohio State University, we'd love for you to drop us a line and keep us apprised of your activities. Announcements, accolades, and job news are always welcomed. Please write to us at cfls@osu.edu and let us share your news with others.
Alumni News
Chris Antonsen is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Folk Studies at Western Kentucky University, in Bowling Green, KY, Chris Antonsen's main interests include heritage and identity, economic development and the conservation of social or cultural elements, and cultural tourism. His recent fieldwork and research have focused on community responses to tourism, development, and historical narrative in the village of Eyam in Derbyshire, England. He has published articles, essays, and reviews in Folklore in Use, the Journal of American Folklore, and the Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature, and presents regularly at the American Folklore Society's annual meeting and other scholarly conferences.Eric Ball received his PhD in Greek and Latin from OSU. Eric, now Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Empire State College-SUNY, has recently published an article in the Summer 2006 issue of the Journal of American Folklore.
Bennis Blue is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Languages and Literature (just promoted and tenured this academic year) at Virginia State University (my undergraduate alma mater) Petersburg, VA. He moved to Virginia in 2005 from Mount Olive College in Mount Olive, NC. He taught as an adjunct in the English Department and worked full time as a staff member in the Education Division at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, NC, and also taught 12th grade English and 8th grade Language Arts while hammering out his dissertation: "Reclaiming a Multicultural Heritage: Race, Identity, and Culture in the Life and Works of Olivia Ward Bush Banks" directed by Amy Shuman. His dissertation committee members included Kitty Locker, Jackie Royster, and Valerie Lee. He spent the summer 1995 at the University of Kentucky as a Minority Summer Dissertation Scholar and received an AFS Travel Grant that took him to the AFS Meeting in Lafayette, LA, where he met Rayna Green and Ernest Gaines, among others, and was able to drive over to Tulane's to research Bush Banks' extant primary texts at the Amistad Library. At OSU, in addition to serving as the Assistant Book Review Editor for JAF, he taught an Intro to Folklore Course under Amy's supervision, served as Jackie Royster's research assistant on the last issue of SAGE, and did ethnographic note-taking and transcribing for Kitty Locker as she prepared her winning text, Business and Professional Communications. Brenda Breuggemann invited him to join a collaborative research project with Scott Miller, Deneen Shepherd, and herself, which netted us an article published in CCCC's journal.
Ruth Staveley Bolzenius was an advisee of Dr. Pat Mullen and earned her Ph.D. in English in 1996. Her dissertation research examined women's diaries of the Oregon and California trails. Ruth is a lecturer at Ohio State University-Marion campus, where she teaches English 109.01 and 109.02 Basic Writing Courses, English Composition 110W, and English 270. In addition, she teaches Freshman Composition at Capital University, in Columbus. She currently coordinates the Learning Skills and Extended Instruction Tutoring Program in the University College at Ohio State.
Charley Camp is Associate Professor of Art and Director of Art History and the Humanities at Anne Arundel Community College in Annapolis, MD. At AACC, he teaches folk art every other semester. He teaches American Folk Art and Folklife at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore among other courses, including (recently) Memento Mori: Death and What Follows. Camp curated the Smithsonian Institution exhibit "Key Ingredients" which tours America in five identical copies. The exhibit is very much a folklorist's take on American foodways, and was well-received when it toured Ohio last year. Foodways continues to be a focus for Camp's research, teaching, and publication. Other areas of research include the anthropology of everyday life, African-American art, and New Deal documentation of folk culture.
Robin Cogburn is engaged in research that follows the path from inception to market of a Mexican handicraft made in Becal, Campeche. Becal is a Mayan village of 4,500 people who are known for the weaving of Panama Hats. The hats are found in most all tourists markets of Mexico. She is particularly interested in the shift of meaning and knowledge about the hats as they move from Becal to Cancun, Quintana Roo, where large numbers of tourists come into contact with them.
Bill Ellis graduated from OSU in 1978, earning a Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in folklore. Bill was appointed Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Penn State Hazelton in 1984; he earned tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1991. His research interests include contemporary legend, rumor, adolescents‚ folklore, new religions, and the folklore surrounding satanism. He is the former editor of FOAFTale News, and former President of the International Society of Contemporary Legend Research. His latest book, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000); forthcoming: Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001).
Kevin I. Eyster is currently an Associate Professor at Madonna University's Department of English & Communication Arts, Kevin graduated from Ohio State with an M.A. in English in 1984, and earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Kentucky in 1991. Kevin continued his education, earning a second M.A. degree in Written Communication from Eastern Michigan University in 1998. His research interests are folklore and literature, Southern American literature, and portfolios for teaching and assessment. Since graduation from OSU, Kevin has been teaching, first as a GTA at University of Kentucky, then at the University of Michigan-Dearborn as adjunct faculty, and finally at Madonna University as part- and full-time faculty. In addition to teaching, Kevin advises students, has written several articles and encyclopedia entries, and served as the Chair of the ECA Department at Madonna from 1998-2000.
Trudier Harris earned her M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1973) from The Ohio State University, which presented her with its inaugural Award of Distinction for the College of Humanities in 1994. Trudier taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for six years before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches courses in African American literature and folklore. She has lectured and published widely in her specialty areas of African American literature and folklore. In addition to lecturing throughout the United States, she has lectured in Jamaica, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, and England. She has published articles and book reviews in such journals as Callaloo, Black American Literature Forum, Studies in American Fiction, and The Southern Humanities Review. Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982); Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984); Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award); Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991); and The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996). She co-edited three volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on African American writers and edited three additional volumes. She edited New Essays on Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1996) for Cambridge University Press and co-edited The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998). During 1996-97, she was a resident fellow at the National Humanities Center, where she worked on her latest book, which is a study of strong black women in African American literature. In the spring of 2000, she was awarded the William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching. Trudier Harris may be reached by writing her at The Department of English, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB# 3520 Greenlaw, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520.
Brooksie Harrington's academic background includes degrees in Speech Education and Spanish Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; certification in English Education from St. Andrew's College, Laurinburg, North Carolina; a Master's of Arts degree in African-American Literature; an additional Master's of Arts degree in English; and a Doctorate Degree in English from The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Harrington's training in Educational Administration came from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Fortunately for Harrington, his travels with the First Lady of Gospel, Shirley Caesar, not only allowed his continued academic pursuits which resulted in his text, Shirley Caesar: A Woman of Words, (housed in the Schomburg Library, Harlem, New York) but also exposed him as a writer to many famous artists. He interviewed, accompanied, or wrote about such personalities as: Albertina Walker, Inez Andrews, Rev. James Cleveland, Dorothy Norwood, Cassietta George, Gloria Washington, Lou Rawls and Joe Lagon. Brooksie's personal Web site.
Rosemary V Hathaway received her Ph.D. in English from Ohio State in 1998, and since starting her tenure-track job at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley in 1999, she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in folklore, American literature, the literary fairy tale, and women's detective fiction, among others. Rosemary's research interests are in tourism and ethnicity, both in terms of how they get played out in folk contexts and in American literature. Recently she has been doing collaborative work with the Colorado state folklorists through the Colorado Council on the Arts and researching the folklore of the "Greeley smell."
Dr. Terry Hermsen, Assistant Professor of English at Otterbein College, is a long-time writer-in-the-schools with the Ohio Arts Council. Hermsen has visited numerous schools around the state teaching poetry. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Goddard College and a Ph.D. in Art Education from The Ohio State University, where he studied folklore with Amy Shuman and studied the connections between visual and verbal learning. He has published two chapbooks of his own poetry, 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems and Child Aloft in Ohio Theater. He also co-edited two anthologies: Teaching Writing from a Writer's Point of View (from National Council of Teachers of English) and O' Taste and See: Food Poems.
Selina Lim
Tim Lundgren graduated in 1996 with a Ph.D. in English. His dissertation focused on Medieval outlaw legends. Tim continues his folklore research in a variety of topics including medieval folklore and the folklore surrounding automobiles. He graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor and now practices environmental and telecommunications law in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the law firm of Varnum, Riddering, Schmidt & Howlett. His current email address is: tjlundgren@varnumlaw.com.
Timothy Lloyd is executive director of the American Folklore Society. Before coming to the Society, Lloyd served as executive director of Cityfolk, a nationally recognized folk arts organization located in Dayton, Ohio. Earlier still, he was deputy director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, before which he served as director of folk arts programs for the Ohio Arts Council and as a folklorist for the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Lloyd received his PhD in American studies from The George Washington University, and his BA in comparative literature and MA in design from The Ohio State University. He has taught folklore at Colorado College, The George Washington University, The Ohio State University, and Utah State University.
His research interests include American foodways, occupational culture, and the history of public practice in the field of folklore. He has published articles and reviews in the major American folklore journals, as well as essays and chapters in edited volumes, and co-authored Lake Erie Fishermen: Work, Identity and Tradition (University of Illinois Press), named the best maritime history book of 1990 by the North American Society for Oceanic History.
Mary Manning earned her masters degree in English Literature from The Ohio State University where her focus was American Literature and folklore, and especially the relationship between the two disciplines. Her work for the last two years has involved the analysis of a collection of over two hundred folktales "The Ohio Valley Folk Research Project," which was put together in the 1950s and 1960s by an amateur folklorist from Chillicothe named David Knowlton Webb. The study looks closely at the relationship between amateur and academic folklorists during the mid-twentieth century. She has served as archivist for the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University and is very excited about participating in the OSU Cares Appalachian Project, a joint project put into motion by OSU's Center for Folklore Studies and the South District Extension Program and supported by a number of other organizations.
Elisabeth Nixon
Elisabeth Nixon graduated in 2006 with a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the Ohio State University. She is an instructor of cultural studies for Franklin University in Columbus, Ohio. For the past several years, she has been active in the areas of folklore and folklife studies, conducting research in foodways, folk belief, material culture, and festivals, celebration, and holidays. Elisabeth's dissertation research is on Halloween celebration in America, specifically focusing on the function and structure of haunted house attractions as a form of folk drama, and are important in identifying, strengthening, and maintaining cultural cohesion within the larger community. She served as an intern with TAUNY (Traditional Arts in Upstate New York), where she spent 2 1/2 months working on a project entitled, "Register of Very Special Places." The intent of this project was to document traditional centers of small town activities that have either been recently replaced or are in danger of disappearing, and to explore the relationship between the people to the site as social gathering place, as source of local customs and expressions, as provider of essential services, and as examples of vernacular architecture. Included was Santa's Workshop (a 1950's theme park), a one-room school house (which was used from 1897-1989) on Grindstone Island, a turn-of-the-carousel, and a "Michigan" hot dog stand, among other places. A publication followed in 2001. Elisabeth has been a co-convener for the Folk Belief and Folk Religion Section of the American Folklore Society, book review editor for FFC, and founder of OSU's Folklore Student Association.
Kristin Peterson-Bidoshi graduated from OSU with a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is assistant professor of Russian at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Kristin recently has published an article in the Summer 2006 issue of the Journal of American Folklore.
Bruce Rosenberg graduated from Ohio State in 1965 with a Ph.D. in English. Currently he teaches in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University.
John Roberts earned a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in folklore from Ohio State in 1976. He has been a professor of African American and African studies and of English at Ohio State since 1996, and is the former chair of the Department of African American and African Studies. Prior to coming to OSU, he was director of the Afro- American studies program and associate professor of folklore and folklife at Penn. Roberts is widely published in the areas of African American folklore and literature and also teaches American fiction and folklore, and folklore theory. He is the author of From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom and From Hucklebuck to Hip: Social Dance in the African American Community in Philadelphia. He is a past president of the both the American Folklore Society and the Association for African and African American Folklore, and is currently on leave from OSU to serve as Deputy Chair for the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C.
Terry Schoone-Jongen.
Jack Shortlidge earned both a B.A. and M.A. in English at Ohio State and is an A.B.D. at Ohio State in English with Folklore as major study area. His research interests and activities include Public Folklore, especially planning and presenting a group's or artist's expressive traditions for various audiences; Folklife-in-Education programs; and Traditional and Popular music (especially in music with traditional roots, such as country, bluegrass, rock, some forms of jazz); Occupational lore and traditions and Film studies. Jack is currently a program officer for the Ohio Humanities Council. His work involves developing and implementing public humanities programs. Some of this work involves the process of evaluating and awarding grants to Ohio organizations engaged in humanities projects; other parts of his job are involved with programs produced by the Council itself, such as the OHC Speakers Bureau, the traveling Ohio Chautauqua (each summer), and literary discussion retreats for people to read and talk about workplace issues in their own professions.
Eric Shepherd
Martha Sims' (M.A., Ohio State, 1989) initial academic work in folklore was an analysis of food and foodways in contemporary fiction. Since then, she has expanded her study, with work in two particular areas. Recently, she has researched and written on folk art, in particular how folk artists identify and expand their roles in their own communities through their art. For the last several years, her pedagogical study and practice consist of drawing together the disciplines of composition and folklore.
Kimberly Spring earned her M.A. in Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University, with a focus in folklore and religion, in Spring 2000. She is currently enrolled at George Washington University, Washington, DC, in the International Development Studies Program at the Elliott School for International Affairs. Her current focus and interests are how individuals and communities deal with development programs, how their identities shift in relation to development issues and what impact does it have on a person and/or a community to be labeled as "developed" or "underdeveloped." Kim's goal is to work as a facilitator or mediator (as part of a third party organization) between communities and development agencies, primarily in situations where conflicts have arisen because of differing cultural assumptions.
Catherine Tosenberger is Assistant Professor of English (Children's Literature) at the University of Winnipeg. She received her M.A. in English (specializing in folklore) from OSU in 2001, and her Ph.D. in English (specializing in children's literature and folklore) from the University of Florida in 2007. Her dissertation was on Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet, and she has published two articles on that topic; she has also written about the folklore-inspired television series Supernatural. She teaches courses on children's literature, fairy tales, and popular culture.
Mickey Weems is trained as a folklorist, anthropologist, and scholar in sexuality studies, peace studies, men's studies, somatics, and religious studies. He graduated with a PhD in Education Policy and Leadership from The Ohio State University in 2007, and published his first book (The Fierce Tribe: Masculine Identity and Performance in the Circuit) in 2008. Since 2003, Mickey and his husband Kevin Mason put on the Qualia Festival of Gay Folklife in Columbus, Ohio every spring, which will be held on May 1-3 in 2009.
Donna L. Wyckoff-Wheeler received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the Ohio State University in 1994. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of American culture and Literature at Baskent University in Ankara, Turkey. She joined her department in 1996, and it was then beginning its second year of operation. Donna notes that it has been both a challenge and a joy to have been a part of Baskent University for the past 4 and a half years and to have participated in the development of the department. She will leave both the department and Turkey at the end of the 2001 academic year to pursue new teaching adventures in South Africa. Donna met her current husband, Tom Wheeler, while in Turkey, and they were married there last June. Tom is a South African and a career diplomat. He has served in the US, England, Malawi, and Australia, and for several years was part of task-forces working to reunite the independent "Homelands" and to transform the Department of Foreign Affairs during the creation of the new Republic of South Africa. He is currently South Africa's ambassador in Turkey, and nonresidential ambassador to Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Donna writes that "marriage has conferred on me the temporary title of 'ambassadress,'" and she will leave Turkey for South Africa in 2001.
