Students              Faculty               Visiting Faculty               Faculty Emeriti               Contact

Caitlin Barbera

MA | Folklore

Caitlin Barbera is a proud Coloradan and got her B.A. in History at Colorado College. While there, she became interested in the medieval history of East Central and Northern Europe, writing her undergraduate thesis on the interplay between paganism, Christianity, conversion and colonization in Lithuania in the Middle Ages. Folklore has been an important part of her life since childhood, when she became an avid reader of mythology, especially Norse mythology. A love of Irish music and a cappella singing has also given her an interest in folk songs and folk music. Her research interests include the conceptions of societal and otherworldly spaces in Old Norse literature. She is currently researching the locations and movements of magic and magic-users in Old Norse literature, especially in relation to gender roles. She has also done research on the interaction between traditionality and individual spirituality in Norse neo-pagan communities in the Bay Area.

Lissett Bastidas

MA | Folklore

Lissett Bastidas grew up in Peru, where she first learned about folklore. There and then, she realized that behind this concept were celebrations, contradictions, and inequalities that refer to the old, rural, Andean, Indian, Afro, or "traditional" in opposition to everything the "modern" should be. She got her B.A. with a double major in International Development Studies and Middle Eastern and North African Studies from UCLA, where she further studied the dichotomy of modernity and traditionality at local and global levels and with interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives. Her research focuses on the effects of these dichotomies on health, health disparities, institutions, law and epistemology in state-funded community programs for mental health. She is currently the Program Manager for the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley.

Héctor Beltran

Assistant Professor | MIT | Anthropology

Héctor Beltrán received his M.A. in Folklore in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology in 2018 from the UC Berkeley. He connects his graduate work to his computer science background, having received a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from M.I.T. For his M.A. thesis, Héctor conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a community organization in Oakland where he taught a basic computing class to migrants who identify as indigenous Maya, mostly from Central America. He focused on the negotiations migrants make when they use digital or “new” media. As representations of the “hard-working migrant” circulate in popular media and subtly incorporate La Frontera Sur (the border between Mexico and Central America), there are high stakes for migrants who circulate their own representations and enter the politics of labor and Latinidad. Thus, Héctor’s work highlighted the ways in which migrants who dwell in complex transnational worlds re-produce (and attempt to re-arrange) a hierarchical migrant Latinx indexical order vis-a-vis the political economy of migration and labor, circulating imaginaries of violence and criminality, and notions of “the state.” A central argument in his thesis is that the multiple experiences of racialization that research participants encountered as they crossed multiple borders provided them with the critical toolkit to deconstruct the institutionalized borders of new media; they use humor and irony to position themselves and other social actors along the participation and production maps at the core of new infrastructures of circulation.

Re-focusing his ethnographic lens on producers of these new technologies, Héctor’s Ph.D. research investigated emerging forms of hacking and tech entrepreneurship by moving between key physical sites in Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area. This project aimed to unpack the specific ways people construct models for technology-driven capitalism as they project their livelihoods into the future. At one level, Héctor’s dissertation makes a comparative analysis of how communities positioned on separate sides of the U.S./Mexico border make small re-inventions to established expert models that promote practices of hacking and entrepreneurship. On another level, he focused on the ways these two tech communities coalesce by participating in events aimed at empowering a Latina/o collective. Thus, this dissertation highlights the striking ways “hacker-entrepreneurs” navigate seemingly contradictory domains as they contest (and construct) new forms of racialization, racism, and capitalism across the complex techno-borderlands.

After spending a year at UC Irvine as a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, he is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Regina Bendix

Professor | Georg-August-Universität | Cultural Anthropology

Regina Bendix is currently a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. Here are a few of her own words about her time in Berkeley and since: "I came to Berkeley in February 1980, about to get married, and figuring out how to continue the study of Volkskunde begun in Zürich, Switzerland, at UC Berkeley. My father-in-law suggested I go see John Gumperz (I did) and Paul Rabinow (I did that too), and then I ventured to see Alan Dundes (waited in line with many others, then went in to see "the man"). He did not know what to make of the name Arnold Niederer, with whom I had studied Volkskunde for three semesters. But when I said I had also studied with Max Lüthi, his face lit up and I somehow seemed to have acquired a sign of distinction for having actually breathed the same air as Lüthi (whose seminars had been, for a freshman, perhaps not quite as scintillating as I should have experienced them, once I grasped the international renown Lüthi enjoyed). Studying in Berkeley was a mind-opening, thrilling experience coming out of a quite different educational and university system in Switzerland—there was joy, excitement, humor, and most of all encouragement to just go where my mind was taking me. Studying with Alan Dundes set me on course to become a folklorist (though I have deeply positive memories also of Laura Nader's "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology," and bewildered memories of Tim White's "Introduction to Physical Anthropology," which I took shortly after Lucy was discovered). I took classes with Bonnie Wade, John Lindow, a great course on the Western with an English professor whose name I cannot remember, and classes with the fabulous visiting scholars Dundes brought every year: Alessandro Falassi, Venetia Newell, and Bengt af Klintberg. 

Though an undergraduate, I was granted access to the two graduate seminars in folklore (as were numerous others, some of whom later would be graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, where I eventually taught). It was an atmosphere that motivated one to study hard and with pleasure—and in a time without digitized library catalogues. The smell of the card catalogue is deeply remembered! As is the pleasure of looking through journals and managing to find another couple promising references for the big bibliographic project for the 250A course. In 1982, I was accepted at IU's graduate program where studies were different, and approaches to folklore more diverse. But what I had been taught at Berkeley remained foundational for much of what I have tried to do and contribute to since. Berkeley was my first station of five during twenty-one years of living in the United States, and I have fond memories of returning to teach a semester (as I was invited to do by Alan Dundes in 1989), returning for a conference, or giving a talk at the invitation of Charles Briggs in more recent years, being in Kroeber Hall, frequenting the coffee shop next door (where I had my first latte—a truly great memory), and enjoying the scent of eucalyptus and the view of the Bay from the hills behind campus. It was and remains one of my favorite places to work and be."

Naomi Bragin

Assistant Professor | University of Washington - Bothell | interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

Naomi Bragin is a dancer and Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington-Bothell, where she teaches courses in hip hop dance, performance research, and Black performance theory. Her article "Shot and Captured," on policing, viral videos and Oakland Turf dance, won the 2015 ASTR Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize and CORD Outstanding Dance Publication. She is the former founding artistic director of DREAM, an Oakland, California-based Streetdance company nominated for the Bay Area's Isadora Duncan Best Choreography Award. Her book project Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics questions the ethics of studying Black movement between stage, street, studio, cyberspace and the underground. She writes, teaches and speaks about hip hop and club dances, popular culture and Black critical theory. 

Anthony Bak Buccitelli

Associate Professor | pennsylvania state university | american studies and communications

Anthony Bak Buccitelli is Associate Professor of American Studies and Communications, Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate Program in Folklore and Ethnography, and Director of the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore at Pennsylvania State University. He also currently serves as editor of the journal Western Folklore, and has previously served as co-editor of Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture.

Buccitelli is author of the book City of Neighborhoods: Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston (2016, University of Wisconsin Press). This volume was selected for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-supported Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World Series, and received honorable mention for the American Folklore Society’s 2016 Wayland D. Hand Prize, “given for the best book combining historical and folkloristic methods and materials.” He is also editor of Race and Ethnicity in Digital Culture Our Changing Traditions, Impressions, and Expressions in a Mediated World (2018, Praeger Books), a two volume edited collection that explores the role of folklore in the changing definitions, practices, and performances of race and ethnicity in the digital age. He has published numerous research articles and scholarly book chapters, which have appeared in Sage Research Methods Foundations, The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies, The Journal of American Folklore, and Oral History, among other venues.

Lashon Daley

PhD Candidate | UC Berkeley | Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

Lashon Daley is a PhD scholar in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the performances of Black cultural expression in the U.S. She is a 2014 Callaloo Poetry Fellow and a 2015 UC Berkeley Chancellor Fellow. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (2008) and an MA in Folklore (2015) from UC Berkeley. Her children's book, Mr. Okra Sells Fresh Fruits and Vegetables was recently published. Lashon is also the creator of Stories&Slams, a podcast that focuses on folktales and every day stories.

Elizabeth Gilbert

MA | Folklore

Elizabeth Gilbert hails from the Lone Star State, having received her B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Communication Management from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. During that time she spent a semester abroad where she conducted an independent study on the contemporary storytelling scene in Ireland. It was here she discovered an interest in folklore, mythology, and the ways in which culture can influence community relationships. This interest has led her to Berkeley to pursue an M.A. in Folklore and back to Ireland in order to explore the ways in which folklore is used politically and otherwise.

Cammeron Girvin

PhD Candidate | Slavic Languages and Literatures

Cammeron Girvin is a PhD candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures with a Designated Emphasis in Folklore. His research centers around the intersection of South Slavic linguistics and folklore studies; he is particularly interested in how speakers of Bulgarian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian use linguistic forms to construct and display local and national identities. Cammeron’s dissertation ties together his background in synchronic and diachronic Slavic linguistics with contemporary folklore theory to explore how elements of “folkloric” language-both small-scale linguistic features and larger poetic structures-were employed in the propaganda of socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to create a new canon of national “folk” texts.

Upon filing his dissertation, Cammeron began working as a voice user interaction designer for a Bay Area tech company. After a year, he moved to Washington DC to join the staff of the Library of Congress. There, he is responsible for the acquisitions and cataloging of resources from the South Slavic countries. From 2016 to 2019, he also served as Editor of the journal of the Bulgarian Studies Association, and he continues to follow research in Balkan and South Slavic studies with great interest.

Ruth Goldstein

ASSISTANT Professor | UC Irvine | GLobal Studies

Ruth Goldstein received her Masters in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 and her PhD from the joint medical anthropology program at the Universities of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco in 2015. Her scholarly interests stem from over ten years of examining human rights and environmental issues. Her Master research examined ethnobotanical practices in Costa Rica related to pharmaceutical development and biopiracy. Her doctoral research analyzed the socio-environmental consequences of transnational infrastructure projects and climate change along Latin America’s recently constructed Interoceanic Road, with a particular focus on sex-trafficking, intersections of race, women’s health and human rights in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. Her book, developed from her doctoral research: “The Traffic in Women, Plants, and Gold: Along the Interoceanic Road in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia” will be published by the University of California Press Series: Nature, Science, Politics. Goldstein’s newest research project traces how mercury carries a racialized valence defining migrant labor populations, often indigenous, as socially, mentally, and physically contaminated in California crop-fields and Amazonian gold mines.

After working as college fellow at Harvard University in the Folklore and Mythology program and an affiliate in Anthropology, she joined the faculty in Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein

Professor | University of Iceland | Folklore

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein is a Professor of Folklore and Ethnology at the University of Iceland. He received his MA in folklore in 1999 and his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with Alan Dundes and John Lindow. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, the Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, and the Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, as well as a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at New York University. 

Valdimar was the president of SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore) from 2013-2017 and he chaired the Icelandic Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2012. He serves on the editorial boards for Ethnologia Europaea, the Journal of American Folklore and Cultural Analysis. He has published in English and Icelandic on topics ranging from cultural heritage to copyright, from UNESCO to contemporary and medieval legends, and from traditional wrestling to CCTV surveillance. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, and Danish. His latest research project, on swimming pool culture, has been covered in media worldwide, including in "Vital Signs" on CNN, in newspapers from the New York Times to the Haaretz, and from a science show on Sweden's Public Service Radio to afternoon traffic talk radio on La FM in Bogotá. For a list of publications, please click here.

Ross Jackson

Dermatologist | Oakland, CA

Ross Jackson received his MA in Folklore in May 2013. Prior to entering the Folklore program, Ross received an MD degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and completed a Residency in Dermatology at Tulane University School of Medicine. Ross practiced Dermatology for 30 years. It was in this clinical setting that his curiosity about tattoos began. For his thesis, entitled The Tattooed Body: Embodied Narratives, Ross undertook a project where he interviewed subjects at tattoo parlors about what meaning their tattoos had for them. His research shows that tattoos may be considered a form of storytelling, where the individual may project statements of identity, commemorate important life events or offer declarations of belief.

Sarah Levin

Lecturer | UC Berkeley | Jewish Studies

Sarah Frances Levin received her PhD  in Jewish Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Folklore from UC Berkeley in 2017. Her current book project, “Poetry Duels, Tales, and Jokes: Moroccan Atlas Mountain Muslims and Jews Remember Each Other,” examines 20th-century Jewish-Muslim relations through 21st-century memories (from Muslims in Morocco and Jews who had immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s) of Amazigh (Berbe) oral traditions. These traditions, once integral to the daily lives of Atlas Mountain villagers, offer a unique framework for addressing issues of boundaries and difference, while simultaneously elucidating the shared cultural experiences of Jews and Muslims.  

Levin’s publications include “The Aḥwash: Jewish and Muslim Articulations of a Shared Amazigh (Berber) Cultural Tradition in Morocco and Its Diaspora,” in Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds, 2021, and “Wit, Ruse, Rivalry, and Other Keys to Coexistence: Reflections of Jewish-Muslim Relations in Berber Oral Traditions,” in North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities, 2007.

In spring 2019 Sarah was a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, where the year’s theme was “Jewish Life in Modern Islamic Contexts.”
As a Lecturer in Jewish Studies, Levin teaches a course on Jewish folktales.

Julia Mckeown

MA | FOLKLORE

Julia is a non-binary Peace Corps Volunteer currently living in and working with Youth in Development in Morocco. They received their Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and minor in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2016. While there, they wrote a senior thesis on the community of vulnerability and positive youth development that occurs within the Triangle’s spoken word and slam poetry community (of which they are a proud member). In May of 2017 they were honored to participate in the Iowa Summer Writers Workshop with James Galvin at the University of Iowa. They are interested in continuing to explore how those ensnared by dominant narratives find spaces and mediums to create their own stories. In particular they are interested in previously colonized countries, questions of LBTQIA* identity in countries with a dominant religious narratives, movements of peoples across physical and socially constructed borders, and many other things. They are very much enjoying watching these interactions unfold in a country where their integration and language skills allow them to be ever more deeply involved in people’s lives.

Shakthi Nataraj

PhD Candidate | Anthropology

Shakthi Nataraj is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology program at UC Berkeley, concurrently pursuing the MA Folklore. She examines narratives about sexual identity in Tamil Nadu, India, as they circulate between LGBT rights activists, lawmakers, journalists and novelists. She is especially interested in how older genres of narrative are blended with contemporary ones, producing new visions of sexual identity and politics. Before coming to Berkeley, Shakthi worked with two gender and sexuality rights NGOs in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

Bob Offer-Westort

MA | Folklore

Bob Offer-Westort comes to the Folklore MA program from over a decade of community organising in homeless communities in San Francisco and Berkeley. He's interested in the internal structure of narrative, how received narratives in turn condition our personal and political lives, and how stories change in movement between narrative communities and through time. His research focuses on the region between the Nile and the Red Sea. Bob holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Long Island University.

Samuel Louis Puliafico

MA | Folklore

Samuel Puliafico is a Southern California native who earned his undergraduate degree from UC Irvine in 2014. While at UC Irvine his research focused on spectacle and performance in American state fairs, festivals, and carnival. After earning his degree in Cultural Anthropology, he spent a year living and working in Ireland. Samuel is currently researching children’s folklore, and he is specifically interested in the aesthetic and design elements of children’s play objects and how they relate to the concept of play studies. Additionally, he is interested in culture production through children’s media and how these ideas can relate.

Tok Thompson

Professor | University of Southern California | Anthropology and Communications

Tok Thompson was born and raised in rural Alaska. At the age of 17, he began attending Harvard College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. In 1999 he received a Master’s degree in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley, and three years later received a PhD in Anthropology from the same institution, all the while studying under the late great folklorist Alan Dundes. After receiving his PhD, Tok engaged in a two-year postdoctoral position with the Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he helped launch a new M.Phil. in Translation Studies. He also researched Irish language traditions in County Fermanagh on behalf of the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and the District Council of Fermanagh. In the Fall of 2006, Tok came to USC, where he has been teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in folklore and related topics. He is now a  Professor of Anthropology and Communications. Additionally, he has taught folklore as a visiting professor at universities in Northern Ireland, Iceland, and Ethiopia.  While still in graduate school, he co-founded  the journal Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, which he co-edited for 15 years. From 2013-2017 he was the editor for Western Folklore. Recent publications include The Truth of Myth, a  textbook for Oxford University Press on World Mythology (with Gregory Schrempp), and a casebook entitled Posthuman Folklore.  Tok has spent each summer commercial fishing in Cook Inlet, Alaska, since he was eleven years old. He currently captains The Dancing Sky. In his spare time he is a singer/songwriter/musician of some renown, having toured and recorded as a solo act and with various rock bands for decades, with some of his songs receiving international airplay.

Elaine Yau

PhD | History of Art with designated emphasis in folklore

Elaine Y. Yau is Associate Curator of the Eli Leon Living Trust Collection of African American Quilts at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); where she is curating an exhibition from Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersections of craft, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on artists such as Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History in 2019. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.