Information about Contributors

Simon J. Bronner is Distinguished University Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, and Director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies. He was recently named Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Culture at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, by the Fulbright Program, and was elected as a Folklore Fellow of the American Folklore Society. He is the author and editor of more than twenty books, the most recent of which includes Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities (2005), Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition (2002), Lafcadio Hearn's America (2002), Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (1998), and the multivolume Encyclopedia of American Folklife (forthcoming, 2006). He is also the editor for the Material Worlds book series with the University Press of Kentucky and Pennsylvania-German History and Culture for Penn State Press.

Alan Dundes was Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He published more than 250 articles and edited and coedited numerous works, including The Study of Folklore (1965) and International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore (1999). His most recent works include Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability (1997), Folklore Matters (1989), From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore (1997), Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore (1999), The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Essay on Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character (2002), Fables of the Ancients?: Folklore in the Qur'an (2003), Folklore: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2005), and several casebooks on the vampire, the walled-up wife, and Oedipus. This address appears posthumously, as Dundes died while it was still in press.

Eugene Valentine is Professor Emeritus of English at Arizona State University, where he taught courses in linguistics and history of the book. Kristin Bervig Valentine is Professor Emerita of Communication and Women's Studies at Arizona State University, where she taught performance studies, oral traditions, ethnography, and qualitative methodology. Together they have been conducting folklore research for more than thirty years and have published in Communication Education, The Journal of Popular Culture, Text and Performance Quarterly, Mediterranean Studies, Southern Folklore, Galician Review, and Europæa. They have contributed several chapters for edited books, including Traditional Storytelling Today (1999), Fiction and Social Research: By Ice or Fire (1998), and Performance, Culture, and Identity (1992). They have also produced three video documentaries on Galician topics, as well as written articles about Galician culture for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore (forthcoming) and The Encyclopedia of World Cultures (1991–1996). Their current research deals with such popular invented traditional celebrations as Zozobra, in New Mexico, and Wheat and Beet Days, in Utah.

Wendy Wickwire is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia. She has produced two books with Okanagan elder Harry Robinson, Write It on Your Heart: In the Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989), Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller ([1992] 2004), and Living By Stories: An Okanagan Journey of Landscape and Memory (fall 2005). She coauthored (with Michael M'Gonigle) Stein: The Way of the River (1988) and Victory Harvest: The Diary of a Canadian in the British Women's Land Army, 1940–1944 (1997). Most recently she guest-edited a special double issue of BC Studies, Ethnographic Eyes: Essays in Memory of Douglas Cole (2000). Her research interests include the oral traditions of the Aboriginal peoples of south-central British Columbia and the history of anthropology in British Columbia. She is currently completing a book on early British Columbia ethnographer James A. Teit.