Folklore News

New Editor for Western Folklore

The Western States Folklore Society is pleased to announce that it now has a new editor, Robert Glenn Howard. Robert is associate director of the Folklore Program and assistant professor in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin where he teaches courses on folklore, religion, and rhetoric. His research focuses on everyday expressive communication in network technologies. He is the author of over twenty articles across four fields including those in Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Church and State, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and New Media and Society. He has published on topics ranging from the way participatory media empowers individuals to the involvement of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation. Since 1994, his primary research interest has been an ethnographic study of evangelical Christian communication online.

For information as to where to submit manuscripts for consideration, please visit the Submission Guidelines page.

2007 Raphael Patai Prize for best unpublished essay in Jewish folklore and ethnology by a student completed in 2007 or 2008

For information, visit the Patai Prize page.

New website for Univ. of Missouri's folklore program

The University of Missouri-Columbia is proud to unveil the new website for the Folklore, Oral Tradition and Culture Studies Program. Please take a moment to check it out by clicking on the program name.

The University of Missouri-Columbia offers an emphasis area in folklore studies at every level--undergraduate, MA and PhD. Its graduates have been very successful in academia and in the public sector.

Oral Tradition now online.

On September 15, 2006, the academic journal Oral Tradition, founded in 1986 by the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri, entered a new chapter in its existence as an international and interdisciplinary forum for the study of worldwide oral traditions and related forms.

As of this date, the journal has become available electronically and free of charge at http://journal.oraltradition.org. The electronic version, known as eOT, is published online as a series of PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files, with key-word searching of all online texts and with embedded multimedia. In addition to the current issue (volume 21, number 1), four years of back issues have already been posted, and plans are underway to include the entire twenty-two years of Oral Tradition by the end of 2007.

John Miles Foley and the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition ask that you help publicize eOT by alerting colleagues in your field regarding its availability, as well as students and reference librarians. The Center wishes to reach as many people and institutions as possible, and thereby to make the discussions that occur in eOT as broadly based and diverse as possible.