Information about Contributors
- Information about Contributors
Sheila Bock is Associate Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her diverse research interests include the contested domains of illness experience, material and digital enactments of personal and community identities, the intersections between folklore and popular culture, and the values and challenges of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Her research has been published in the Journal of Folklore Research (2011, 2012); Western Folklore (2014); Journal of Folklore and Education (2014); Western Journal of Black Studies (2012); Journal of Medical Humanities (2015); Health, Culture, and Society (2013); Diagnosing Folklore: Perspectives on Disability, Health, and Trauma (essay co-authored with Kate Parker Horigan, ed. Trevor J. Blank and Andrea Kitta, 2015); Comfort Food: Meanings and Memories (ed. Michael Owen Jones and Lucy M. Long, 2017); and the Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies (ed. Simon J. Bronner, 2018).
Jeana Jorgensen is a feminist folklorist, alternative academic (alt-ac) scholar, blogger, sex educator, and dancer. She holds a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University (2012) and studied under Alan Dundes at UC Berkeley as an undergraduate. The bulk of her research focuses on gender and sexuality in fairy tales and folk narrative more generally, body art, dance, digital humanities, feminist and queer theory, and the history of sex education. Her more recent research looks at the Biden meme cycle and disability and desire in The Shape of Water. She has published her work in Marvels & Tales, Cultural Analysis (2012), Literary and Linguistic Computing (2013), Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (2012), the Folklore Historian (2010), New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales (ed. Christa C. Jones and Claudia Schwabe, 2016), Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translations and Texts from around the World, 2nd edition (ed. Anne Duggan and Donald Haase, with Helen Callow, 2016), Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television (ed. Pauline Greenhill and Jill Rudy, 2014), and Transgressive Tales: Queering the Brothers Grimm (ed. Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill, 2012), among others.
Miriam Melton-Villanueva is Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Melton-Villanueva travels to archives looking for underrepresented voices. Her latest essay in Ethnohistory (2018) shows that indigenous women in the late colonial and early national period retained significant economic and social status in their central Mexican communities. She wrote her first book, The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico 1799–1832 (2016), as a Ford Foundation Fellow at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center.
Venla Sykäri is a researcher and Adjunct Professor of Folklore in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on oral poetry, the practices of oral composition and performance, and the formation and social indexicality of these practices in current communities, particularly within Finnish hip-hop. Her dissertation, “Words as Events: Cretan Mandinádhes in Performance and Composition” (2011), based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Crete, examines a culture of rhyming couplets. Recent publications include “Beginning from the End: Strategies of Composition in Lyrical Improvisation with End Rhyme,” a comparative article on contemporary, rhymed, and argumentative forms of oral poetry (Oral Tradition, 2017). She is currently working on a project for The Finnish Literature Society analyzing the poems of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala and their relation to archived folk poetry material.
