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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 English Department 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 people’s experiences with diabetes, 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 is currently the Graduate Administrative Associate at the OSU Center for Folklore Studies.

Elizabeth De Simone
Elizabeth De Simone is currently the graduate co-chair of FSA and is working on her Masters in the Slavic and East European Language and Literature department. She hopes to get her MA in June with her thesis on Nikolai Leskov's sympathetic portrayal of Old Believers in his story "The Sealed Angel" during a time when Old Believers were persecuted and sometimes even loathed in Russia (19th Century). She hopes to do her doctoral dissertation on a community of Old Believers in the United States focusing on how historic, family and personal narratives create community. Not her own church, of course, because that would just cause a whole lot of problems, even if the old ladies of her church did inspire her dissertation idea. She graduated with her BA in Russian Studies from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan in 2006. Her senior thesis was on the Church and Magic in Russia. She also presented an abbreviated version of this paper for the 2007 FSA student conference. Outside of school she is happily married to a fellow graduate student and has two wonderful, cuddly dogs, and an adorable cat, that she loves even if no one else does.

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.

Andy Paluch
Andy Paluch is a 4th year English and Comparative Studies major focusing on Ethnographic Methods and Comparative Cultural Criticism. Specific research interests center on the application of Buddhist and phenomenological models of non-duality to the ethnographic study of performed narrative. Andy is currently working with professors Amy Shuman and Tom Kasulis on his thesis project, entitled, "Toward an Affective Method: Preserving Experiential Meaning in the Analysis of Performance." Andy serves as the Co-Chair of the Folklore Student Association. In past years, he has presented the titles, "Knowing the Unknown: A Study in Rural Storytelling" and "The Reluctant Storyteller: Negotiating Performance and Contextual Ambiguity" at annual FSA student conferences. Next year he hopes to pursue an MA in Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. Deep down, Andy wants to be Bob Dylan but, of course, could be perfectly content turning out like Pat Mullen. He is currently working on his facial hair.

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.

Joanna Spanos
Joanna Spanos is a 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 Eowyn the golden retriever, Joanna is an academic advisor in the Arts and Sciences Honors Program.

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.