Information about Contributors

Ruth Tsoffar is Assistant Professor of Hebrew language and culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of The Stains of Culture: Textuality, the Karaites, and the Female Body (forthcoming) and other articles on Hebrew poetry and films, including, "Staging Sexuality, Reading Wallach's Poetry" (Hebrew Studies). She is currently completing a study on the role of national ideology in the construction of gender, ethnicity, and other minority cultures in Israel.

Sw. Anand Prahlad is Professor of English at the University of Missouri—Columbia, where he teaches courses in the Folklore Studies and the Creative Writing Programs. He has authored numerous articles and three books, including African American Proverbs in Context (1996), Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music (2001), and Hear My Story and Other Poems (1982). Prahlad's current research interests involve race and gender theory; the intersections of fetishism, folklore, and popular culture; and postcolonial perspectives on folkloristics. He is currently editing a four-volume encyclopedia set on African American folklore (forthcoming in 2005) and completing an anthology of body poems from the African Diaspora.

Phillip H. McArthur is Associate Professor of International Cultural Studies and a fellow to the Pacific Institute at Brigham Young University Hawaii. He presently serves as Associate Dean of General Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. He has authored such works as "Oceania: An Overview" (2002), "Narrating to the Center of Power in the Marshall Islands" (2000), and "More Than Meets the Ear: A Marshallese Example of Folklore Method and Study for Pacific Collections" (1996). His research emphasizes social theoretical and semiotic approaches to narrative, cultural performance, history, cosmology, nationalism, and transnationalism in Oceania.

DoVeanna Fulton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis, where she teaches courses in African American literature and culture, American literature, and women's literature. Her research interests include Black feminist criticism, identity and self-representation in narrative constructions, African American culture and literature, and African American oral traditions found in literature and music. Her past research identified African American women's oral discursive practices, relating personal and family slavery experiences in nineteenth-century autobiography and biography as well as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. Her current research is on African American women's gospel music as cultural critique.