About the Authors

Mark C. Amodio, Professor of English at Vassar College, is the author of Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England (2004). He has recently co-edited, with Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr. (2003).

Samuel G. Armistead is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Classics at the University of California at Davis. He has published widely (some twenty-five book-length publications, together with several hundred articles) on medieval Spanish literature, modern Hispanic oral literature, and comparative literature.

Sabir Badalkhan is Lecturer at the Università di Napoli, and currently Visiting Professor at Ohio State University (2003-04). He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Pakistani and Iranian Balochistan as well as among the migrant Baloch workers in the Arabian Peninsula. He has published on Balochi oral poetry, folktales, ethnomusicology, onomastics, and the minstrelsy tradition of the Baloch.

Mark Bender is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. His interests include oral poetry and the folklore of ethnic groups in southern and northeastern China and East Asia. His latest book is Plum and Bamboo: China's Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (2003).

Naran Bilik is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociocultural Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Bernstein Visiting Professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology (2003-06) at Carleton College. He is interested in semiotic approaches to ethnicity and politico-cultural boundaries.

Mary Ellen Brown, Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, has long had a particular interest in ballads, as well as the history and intellectual salience of that study. Her most recent work includes William Motherwell's Cultural Politics 1797-1835 (2001).

Isabel Cardigos is founder and director of a center for oral literature (Centro de Estudos Ataide Oliveira) at the University of Algarve. She is the co-director of its yearly journal, Estudos de Literatura Oral (Studies in Oral Literature). She has recently written the entries on "Portugal" and "Shoes" for the Enzyklopädie des Märchens.

Chan E. Park is Associate Professor of Korean language, literature, and performance studies at Ohio State University. She researches p'ansori, Korean story-singing, related oral narrative/lyrical/dramatic traditions, and their place in the shaping of modern Korean drama. Among her publications is Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story-Singing (2003).

Michael Chesnutt is Professor of medieval and folklore studies at the Arnamagnaean Institute, University of Copenhagen. His recent publications include the final volume of the Faroese ballad corpus and a major study of medieval Danish liturgy.

Robert Cochran directs the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas. His latest books are A Photographer of Note (2003) and Come Walk With Me (forthcoming, 2004).

Mary-Ann Constantine directs the Iolo Morganwg Project at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth, where she is studying Romantic literary forgery. Her Breton Ballads (1996) won the Katharine Briggs Award for Folklore in 1996, and, with Gerald Porter, she has recently published Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song (2003).

Robert Payson Creed is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published widely on Beowulf and comparative oral traditions, including Old English Poetry: Fifteen Essays (1967) and Reconstructing the Rhythm of Beowulf (1990).

Sioned Davies, Professor of Welsh at Cardiff University, has published extensively on medieval storytelling as reflected in the tales of the Mabinogion. Her current project, "Performing from the Pulpit," examines the dramatic preaching of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wales.

Olga Merck Davidson is Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Brandeis University. She has published numerous studies on Persian and Iranian oral tradition, including Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (1994) and more recently Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry (2000).

Thomas A. DuBois is Professor of Scandinavian studies and folklore at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his...