About the Authors

Sabir Badalkhan, Ph.D. in folklore ("Minstrelsy Tradition in Balochistan," Naples, 1994), teaches at the University of Naples. His research interests include oral tradition in Balochistan (both in Pakistan and Iran); itinerant musicians, singers, and storytellers in southwest Asia; and the presence of African musical culture in Pakistan. He has published widely on Balochi oral traditions, and among his articles are "The Changing Contents of Baloch Women's Songs" and "An Introduction to the Performance of Verbal Art in Balochistan."

Robert Cochran is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, where he chairs the American Studies program and directs the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies. His latest book is Come Walk With Me (2004); his survey of Arkansas music, Our Own Sweet Sounds, will be published in 2005. He is currently at work on a biography of Nebraska folklorist Louise Pound.

Margalit Finkelberg is Professor and Chair of Classics at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998) and co-editor of Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (2003). Her book entitled Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition will be published in 2005.

H. Wakefield Foster has been a professional freelance oboist in Houston, Texas since 1972. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has published "The Role of Music" in The Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Bećirbey as Performed by Halil Bajgorić (2004).

Marie Nelson, now Professor Emerita at the University of Florida, has published two books, Structures of Opposition in Old English Poems (1989) and Judith, Juliana, and Elene: Three Fighting Saints (1991), along with essays on medieval literature ranging from "The Rhetoric of the Exeter Book Riddles" to "'Biheste is Dette': Marriage Promises in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales."

Lillis Ó Laoire lectures in Irish Language and Literature in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick. He also directs Ionad na nAmhrán (The Song Centre) at the Irish World Music Centre (UL), a research and archiving project focused on song traditions of Ireland. Currently on leave of absence, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.