Field-Of-Study: Folklore and Popular Culture

Gayle Wald is Professor and Chair of English at George Washington University, where she teaches African American literature and U.S. popular music culture. She received her B.A. in English and French from the University of Virginia (1987) and her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University (1995), where she benefited from a lively intellectual community of

For the past two decades I have examined the intersection of politics, social position, and the performance arts among Roma (Gypsies), currently the largest and perhaps the most maligned minority in Europe. My past research has explored how Roma have forged a nuanced identity in diverse locations in the Balkans and in re-diasporic spaces (originally

Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a chair he has held since 2009. For more than three decades before that, he held appointments at the University of Delaware, first as a Lecturer in American Studies and History

Alan Govenar is a writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker. He received a B.A. with distinction in American Folklore from Ohio State University in 1974, a M.A. in Folklore from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Arts and Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1984. Govenar is

Joshua Gamson earned a B.A. from Swarthmore, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. On completing his doctoral degree, he took up an appointment as an assistant then associate professor of sociology at Yale, remaining there for nine years before accepting a position as associate professor of sociology

Thomas Brothers is Professor of Music at Duke University, where he teaches jazz, African-American music and late medieval music. He holds a Ph. D. degree in music from the University of California at Berkeley.  His most recent book is entitled Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (W. W. Norton 2006).  He has also published Chromatic Beauty in

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Chair of the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University; she teaches courses on German culture, folklore, and children’s literature. She has written books in all three areas, among them Lustmord: Sexual Violence in Weimar Germany, The Annotated Brothers Grimm,