Information about Contributors

Alexandra Arkhipova is Senior Research Fellow in the Center of Typological and Semiotics Folklore Studies, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia. She earned her Ph.D. in folklore and language studies in 2004 and teaches courses in comparative folklore and contemporary folklore. Editor of a website entitled "Folklore and Postfolklore: Structure, Typology, Semiotics" (.ruthenia.ru/folklore), she has written on fairy tales structures, the history and theory of joke telling, and the linguistic features of Russian anecdotes. With Seth Graham and Federica Visani, she has prepared a monograph entitled Anecdote and Film: About the New Type of Russian Jokes.

Yuri E. Berezkin is Head of the Department of American Studies at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, and Professor at European University at St. Petersburg in the Faculty of Ethnology. He has published 200 papers and several books on American Indian mythology, Peruvian iconography, and Central Asian archaeology. During the past fourteen years, he has been engaged in creating an electronic data base of American and Eurasian mythology and folklore.

Susan Crate is Assistant Professor of Human Ecology, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. With an M.A. in Folklore and a Ph.D. in Ecology (both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), her research focus is inherently interdisciplinary. She writes on such diverse topics as oral history memory-scapes, rural post-Soviet cultural ecology, elder knowledge, local perceptions of global climate change, and sustainable indigenous communities. She is presently completing a book that integrates these and other themes entitled Cows, Kin, and Globalization.

Ray Cashman earned his Ph.D. in folklore at Indiana University and is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he teaches folklore, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. His articles on wakes, mumming, folklife studies, intersections of landscape and narrative, and outlaws in folklore and popular culture have been published in Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Midwestern Folklore, Folklore Forum, New Hibernia Review, and Cultural Analysis. He is presently completing a book manuscript entitled Storytelling on the Irish Border: The Social Uses of Folklore in Context and investigating the performative aspects of oral history-telling by former civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama.

William J. Dewan received his B.S. in anthropology at James Madison University in 2000 and his M.A. in anthropology at East Carolina University in 2002. He is currently a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches a course on American popular culture. A native of Virginia, Dewan's past and present research interests include a variety of traditions of anomalous belief that include ghost lore, UFO lore, and monster lore.

Andrey V. Korotayev is Professor and Head of the Anthropology of the East Program at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, where he teaches courses in cultural anthropology and the history of North Africa and Eurasia. He has authored nine monographs, including Ancient Yemen (Oxford University Press, 1995), Pre-Islamic Yemen (Harrassowitz, 1996), and World Religions as a Factor of Social Evolution (Mellen, 2004). His numerous articles in cross-cultural anthropology and the cultural history of Asia have appeared in a range of journals, including Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Ethnology, Orientalia, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the Journal of Semitic Studies. He is currently researching the origins and evolution of dualistic cosmogonies.

Artem V. Kozmin is Research Fellow in the Centre of Typological and Semiotic Folklore Studies, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia. He has published papers on traditional Russian folklore and formal approaches to folkloristics. He is currently working on an integrated digital system for tale types and motif indices.