Georgios Anagnostu
An Assistant Professor in the Department of Greek and Latin at Ohio State University. His research interests include identity politics, "whiteness studies," ethnicity and diaspora studies. He currently works on the racial formation of Greek Americans as "whites" and the cultural politics of ethnic memory.
Erika Bourguignon
Professor Emerita with the Department of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. A cultural anthropologist, Erika is renown internationaly for her contributions in psychological anthropology and the anthropology of religion. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Exile: An American Anthropologist’s Reflections on the Memoir of an Austrian Refugee of 1939 (with Rigney); Psychological Anthropology: An Introduction to Human Nature and Cultural Differences (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979); and "Cross - Cultural Perspectives on the Religious Use of Altered States of Consciousness," in Religious Movements in Contemporary America (Princeton Univ. Press, 1 974).
Robert Barsky
An Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, specializing in 20th century literatures, literary theories, radical theory and refugee studies. He is the author of Constructing a Pr oductive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention Refugee Hearing (John Benjamins 1994); Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (MIT Press, 1997); Introduction à la théorie littéraire (U of Quebec Press, 1997); Arguing and Justifying: Assessing the Convention R efugee Choice of Moment, Motive and Host Country (Ashgate 2001); The Chomsky Approach (MIT Press, forthcoming); Zellig Harris (MIT Press, forthcoming), and translated Michel Meyer's Philosophy and the Passions (Penn State 2000). Robert has also edited volu mes on Mikhail Bakhtin, Marc Angenot, French Theory and Workers Councils
Ana Cara
An Associate Professor of Spanish at Oberlin College. Ana is a nationally - recognized folklorist on Argentinian and Carribean cultures; she is interested in the relationship between tradition and innovation in expressive forms, oral and written conventions in the verbal arts, communal creation and single authorship, social function and aesthetic evaluation, national and self expression, conservative and subver sive discourses in the arts, the relationship between folk forms and literary genres, and the creolization of cultures. She recently completed an edited volume on creolization.
Mary Hufford
is a folklife specialist with the American Folklife Center, Librar y of Congress. Her publications include Chaseworld: Foxhunting and Storytelling in New Jersey's Pine Barrens and an edited collection of essays, Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. An American Memory Web site at the Library of Congress, Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia , is based on her work with communities in southern W est Virginia. With the support of a Guggenheim fellowship, she is also writing a book on environmental imaginaries in southern West Virginia.
Melinda Kanner
is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Melinda speciali zes in psychological anthropology, with a concentration in ethnopsychiatry. Her research focuses on the contemporary U.S. and her research interests include: history of science, cultural studies, identity politics, and lesbian and gay studies. She has exam ined a wide variety of topics including alcoholism, women in film, tourism, the history of anthropology, and country music, and an analysis of the roles of place of identity in tourism in the southern United States. Currently, Melinda is completing two boo ks: a study of the cinematic representations of alcoholic women, and an analysis of the theme of work in country music. Melinda is both a scholar and a public intellectual, engaged in taking academic issues into the public arena.
Norma Mendoza - Denton
An Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Arizona.
Amy Horowitz
A Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, she works on Palestinian and Israeli Jewish conceptions of each other and has produced the documentary, Jerusalem: Gates to the City , which examines this topic.
Valerie Lee
A Professor of Women's Studies and English at The Ohio State University. Lee does research on African - American literature and folklore, slave narratives, and women's literature. She is the author of Gran ny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double - Dutched Readings (Routledge, 1996) and Invisible Man's Literary Heritage: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick . She currently serves as the chair of the Department of Women's studies at OSU.
Lucy M. Long
is an Assistant P rofessor of Popular Culture and Folklore at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, specializing in folklore, popular culture, and ethnomusicology. She is the current editor of Digest: A Review for the Interdisciplinary Study of Food , and prod ucer of a documentary video titled, Grand Rapids Apple Butter Festival: Constructing Local Heritage , funded by the Ohio Humanities Council. Lucy has authored many articles on foodways and ethnomusicology, including: "Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspe ctive on Eating and Otherness," (contributor and editor, Southern Folklore Quarterly 1998); "Holiday Meals: Rituals of Family Tradition," (In The Meal, ed. Herbert Meisselman, Aspen Publishers 2000); and "Appalachian Dulcimer," "Hicks Family," (Encyclopedi a of Appalachia, forthcoming 2001). Her most current work documents Latino musical traditions in Toledo, Ohio.
Margaret Mills
Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. Widely regarded as a leading specialist in the popular culture of the Persian and Farsi - speaking world, her book Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) won the 1993 Chicago Folklore Prize for best academic work in fo lklore. She is the author or co - editor of four additional books, with two others in preparation, as well as numerous other publications.
Richard Moore
An Associate Professor of Human and Community Resource Development at The Ohio State University. As an anthropologist, Richard conducts agro - ecological research on Ohio and Japanese farmers, focusing on ecology and economics. He is also a part of an Agro - Ecosystems Management Program (AMP) team working on sustainable agriculture wirh a multidisciplinary te am centered at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. Currently Richard is researching grassroots methods for communities to organized to improve the environmental quality of their watersheds. For the seminar, Richard will discuss the farmi ng community case of Sugar Creek near Wooster, Ohio.
Dorothy Noyes
An Assistant Professor of English and Folklore at the Ohio State University. Dorothy works in the area of collective performance. She is nationally recognized for her contributions to fo lklore scholarship on festival, riddle, and conceptions of group. She is the author of numerous articles on Italian - American and Catalonian festival, political ritual, folk art, and heritage politics, including "Group" ( JAF , Summer 1995, 108:429); "Contest ing the Body Politic: The Patum of Berga" (in Bodylore, ed. Katherine Young); "From Calendar Custom to National Memory: European Commonplaces" (co - authored with Roger D. Abrahams in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity , ed. Dan Ben - amos and Lil iane Weissberg); and "La Maja Vestida: Dress as Resistance to Enlightenment in Late - 18th - Century Madrid" (JAF, Spring 1998). Her current book project is The Mule and the Giants: Contest and Incorporation in the Patum of Berga .
Bonnie O'Connor
Associate Professor of Community and Preventive Medicine at MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. A folklorist and ethnographer, she specializes in cultural and cross - cultural issues in health care; patients' perspectives on health/illness/care; and complementary/alternative medicine (CAM), including US folk healing traditions. She is the author of Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and Health Professions .
Chan Park
An Assistant Professor with the Department of East Asian Languages and Litera ture at the Ohio State University. Chan focuses her work on Korean language, literature, poetry and traditional oral narratives, and Asian and Western drama and theatre. Along with several years of traditional performing arts training, she has also been th e recipient of various awards including this year's Academy of Korean Studies Research Fellowship. Her publications include Ch’angguk of Korea: Song of Ch’unhyang; Song of Shim Ch’ong (National Theater of Korea, 1995) and contributions to Folktales from Ko rea, World Folklore Series (Libraries Unlimited, 1999), Traditional Storytelling Today: An International Sourcebook (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999), and Perspective on Korea (Wild Peony, 1998).
Barre Toelken
Professor of English and History, and the Director of the Folklore Program at the Utah State University. He has been involved in both academic and public folklore since the 1960s, and has served as Chairman of the Folk Arts Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, Director of the Montana Folklife Survey, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, Director of the Folklore and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Oregon, President of the American Fo lklore Society, and editor of the Journal of American Folklore. His publications include The Dynamics of Folklore, Morning Dew and Roses: Nuance, Metaphor, and Meaning in Folksongs, Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends, an d The Ballad and the Scholars: Approaches to Ballad Study , with D. K. Wilgus. Judy Tzu -
Chun Wu
An Assistant Professor of History at Ohio State University and co - coordinator of the Asian American Studies Program, administered by the Division of Comparati ve Studies. Her areas of specialization include U.S., Asian American, and Women's Histories. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University in 1998 and is writing a thematic biography of Dr. Margaret Chung (1889 - 1959), the first American - b orn Chinese female physician. Wu has published two articles: "Was Mom Chung a 'Sister Lesbian?': Asian American Gender Experimentation and Interracial Homoertocism," ( Journal of Women's History , Spring 2001); and "'Loveliest Daughter of Our Ancient Cathay! ": Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identities in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Beauty Pageant" (Journal of Social History, Fall 1997), recently reprinted in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America , ed. by Philip Scranton (Rout ledge 2001).