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Folklore Student Association Members

Ohio State University's folklore graduate students may represent a wide range of academic disciplines, but all of our students are dedicated to furthering folklore research.

Our folklore graduate students contribute significantly to the intellectual life of the Center and play leading roles in many of its social and academic activities, such as curriculum development, mentoring, organization of discussion groups and Colloquium presentations, public lectures, and conferences. They are engaged in a variety of scholarly research endeavors, including public programming, documentary, and academic media productions.

Current FSA Members

Biographies


Sheila Bock
Sheila Bock is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English with a focus on Folklore Studies. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and her M.A. in Comparative Studies from the Ohio State University. Currently, she is working on her dissertation on diabetes health education, bringing together her interests in foodways, narrative, the body, and the intersections of institutional and vernacular knowledge. She has also done research on jokes and belly dance, and she has conducted fieldwork collecting information on Ohio foodways as well as oral histories of Native Americans in Ohio. She has taught "Introduction to Folklore," "American Icons," and first and second level undergraduate writing courses at OSU, and she has assisted Professor Sabra Webber with her course on "Arab American Family Immigration Sagas." She has also worked as the Archivist and the Graduate Administrative Associate at the OSU Center for Folklore Studies.

Clayton Buffer
Clayton Buffer is an undergraduate at the Ohio State University pursuing a degree in Comparative Studies with an emphasis in Folklore. He is currently working on a project under the dual supervision of Ray Cashman and Barbara Lloyd about the folklore of the University District. He has not yet found a particular subject of interest on which to focus as he finds everything far too interesting.

Catherine Dean-Haidet
My interests in the cultural, scientific and spiritual aspects of healing are strongly influenced by my experiences as a nurse practitioner working with dying patients and their families. I am interested in the construction of medical knowledge across cultures and time, folkloric and vernacular approaches to health and illness, cross-cultural constructs of identity and boundaries especially related to the dying process, cross-cultural models of healing and therapeutic relationship, and how belief affects healing and dying. I have just completed an ethnographic study that examines the effects of Zen meditation on members of the interdisciplinary team at a local hospice. In this study I use the intimacy/integrity cultural relationship model of Dr. Tom Kasulis (professor, OSU Comparative Studies) to look at caregivers' relational perceptions of self and other.

I am keenly interested in cultural variations of medicine especially Indian Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, as well as Eastern and Western contemplative and meditative approaches to death and dying. In future projects, I would like to complete a cross-cultural study of spiritual/energy healing, perhaps comparing the American energy healing technique of therapeutic touch with Chinese external qigong.

I have studied folkloric herbalism, music and movement therapy (the topic of my masters thesis in nursing), and therapeutic touch for the last 15 years. Professionally I maintain a small practice that offers healing ways to clients seeking complementary approaches to biomedicine. For fun, I like to take long walks, teach yoga, grow medicinal herbs, and play the Celtic harp.

Ann Ferrell
Ann Ferrell holds a BA in Women’s Studies from the State University of New York, College at New Paltz and received an MA in Folk Studies from Western Kentucky University in 1999. While an MA student, she worked as an editorial assistant with Southern Folklore and completed a thesis entitled, "‘Beyond Celebration’: A Call for the Study of Traditions of Dominance." She has served as president of the OSU Folklore Student Association and as a member of OSU’s President’s Council on Women. She has taught courses in the Department of English including First Year Writing, English 367, and Intro to Folklore. Her research interests include family folklore, gender, the American South, and history and theory of the discipline of folklore. She is currently working on her dissertation, conducting fieldwork with Kentucky tobacco farmers and others involved in farming in Kentucky.

Kirsi Haenninen
Kirsi Haenninen is a Fulbright Fellow and Ph.D candidate at the Department of Comparative Studies. She is focusing on Folklore Studies and has a strong interest in Religious Studies and Narrative Studies. She received her MA in Folklore Studies from the University of Turku, Finland. Currently, she is working on her dissertation on stigmatization and revitalization of the supernatural and construction of normalcy in the Finnish first person supernatural encounter narratives. In addition to that, her research interests include history and theory of the discipline of folklore, modernization processes in Europe and social-constructionist approach to emotions. She has worked in academia, archives and NGOs, both in the US and in Europe. She is currently the archivist at the OSU Center for Folklore Studies.

Anne Henochowicz
Anne Henochowicz is a second-year MA student of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. She studies Inner Mongolian folk culture, and is especially interested in Mongol-Han cultural exchange and folk music. She earned her BA summa cum laude in Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania (2006) and an MPhil in Ethnomusicology at the University of Cambridge (2007). Her MPhil dissertation is titled "The Beautiful Grasslands: Folksong, Imagination and Identity in Urban Inner Mongolia."

Nicole Musgrave
Nicole Musgrave is a fourth year undergraduate student studying International Business and Folklore through Comparative Studies. Her main interests in the field of folklore include American folk music and the English and Scottish ballad tradition, as well as crafts and art. Nicole plans to attend graduate school upon completion of her Bachelor's degrees to pursue her study of Folklore.

Nicole Nieto
Nicole Nieto is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Women's Studies, pursuing a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore Studies. She received her B.A. in International Studies with a focus on Latin American Studies from the University of Southern Mississippi. She received her M.A. in Women's Studies from the University of Alabama, where she completed a thesis on Latina activism. Her current research involves culinary narratives in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Nicole, a Louisiana native, currently serves as an Intercultural Specialist at The Multicultural Center in the Office of Student Life.

Katherine Parker
Katherine Parker comes to OSU after two years of teaching at Delgado Community College in New Orleans, and before that getting her MA and BA at Tulane University. She was drawn to OSU's innovation in Narrative Studies, particularly Project Narrative, and the interdisciplinary possibilities created by the Center for Folklore Studies. She is interested specifically in the possibilities and the limits of representing trauma through narration.

Cassie Patterson
Cassie Patterson recently graduated from California State University, San Bernardino in Fall of 2007 with two BA's, one in English and one in Philosophy. In addition to working to obtain an MA in English, Cassie is also working toward obtaining a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore. Cassie's interests include Appalachian Literature, Ethnographic studies of Appalachian Identity, Ethnic Literature, Postcolonial Literature, and Narrative Theory. Overall, she hopes to merge her new found interest in Narrative Theory with her interest in literatures of misrepresented peoples in order to expose both general characteristics of oppressed literatures and individual solutions.

Elo-Hanna Seljamaa
Elo-Hanna Seljamaa is a Fulbright Fellow and second-year PhD student at the Department of Comparative Studies. She received her BA with major in Folklore (2004) and MA in Folklore (2006) from the University of Tartu, Estonia, where she also worked as an assistant and researcher before coming to the OSU. Her MA thesis was on the conceptual foundations of the historic-geographic method and she has also done research on chain letters and most recently on Estonian infanticide ballads. Elo-Hanna's dissertation focuses on ethnic relationships between Russians and Estonians in contemporary Estonia. She is currently the Graduate Administrative Associate at the OSU Center for Folklore Studies and also secretary of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

Joanna Spanos
Joanna Spanos is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Studies. She received her B.S. with majors in Biology and History from Denison University, where she completed an interdisciplinary honors thesis examining historical uses of the Ranunculaceae (buttercup) family. She received her M.A. in History from Pennsylvania State University, during which time she held a Weiss Interdisciplinary Fellowship. Her current interests involve using folklore methods to examine the marginalization of folk medical practitioners in the Medieval and Early Modern worlds, and child murder ballads. Previously, Joanna taught European and world history in a variety of settings, including an inner-city charter school and Columbus State. When she is not in class, doing research, or playing with her son Ben and his golden retriever, Eowyn, Joanna is an academic advisor in the Arts and Sciences Honors Program.

Michael Wiatrowski
Michael Wiatrowski is a fourth year English and Comparative Studies major. Currently he is the Treasurer of the Folklore Student Association, Committee Member for the Undergraduate Folklore Minor, and the Student Assistant for Dr. Amy Shuman. He intends to graduate no later than Spring 2010 before pursuing a Masters in Folklore and a PhD in English. A short list of his areas of study include: oral narrative and tradition, fairy tales, the quest of the Hero, ritual and performance, fakelore, ethnographic studies of "modern" subcultures, and religious myth. He is currently working on an undergraduate thesis on the Super-Hero comic book as a replacement for the traditional oral hero narrative in modern American culture, entitled "Four Color Folklore".

Nancy Yan
Nancy Yan is a doctoral candidate in folklore through the English Department at the Ohio State University. She graduated from the George Washington University in Washington DC in 1994 with a degree in international affairs. After working in DC, she relocated to San Francisco and became involved with grassroots organizing, immigrant rights issues, youth leadership, and electoral politics. She served as a field organizer for the California Democratic Party in 1998 and a District Organizer for the San Francisco Labor Council's electoral efforts in 1999 and 2000. Her dissertation research examines Chinese restaurants in the American context as sites of contested authenticity and American identity.