Professor Ülo Valk To Join UC Berkeley This Fall As Visiting Professor of Folklore and Anthropology

Ülo Valk studied folkloristics at the University of Tartu from 1980 until 1986 and later worked as a research assistant, research fellow and senior research fellow at the folklore department of the Institute of Language and Literature. Since 1993 he has been teaching at the University of Tartu, where he defended his Dr. Phil. dissertation on the image of the Devil in Estonian folk religion in 1994. In 1995 he became professor extraordinary of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, and in 1998 full professor. During 2000-2001 he worked as a visiting professor of folkloristics at the department of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley; during 2003-2004 he was Fulbright Fellow at the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania. During 2005-2009 Ülo Valk served the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) as its president. His research has mainly focused on genre theory of folklore, belief narratives, religious folklore in social context, and folk religion of South Asia. He is the editor of the journal Numen: International Review for the History of Religions (Brill) and principal investigator of two research projects: the international “Re-storied Sites and Routes as Inclusive Spaces and Places: Shared Imaginations and Multi-layered Heritage” (EMP340; 2020−2023) and ”Vernacular Interpretations of the Incomprehensible: Folkloristic Perspectives Towards Uncertainty” (PRG670; 2020–2024).