UC Berkeley Folklore is excited to welcome Professor Tim Tangherlini to our department as a faculty member and graduate adviser.

Timothy R. Tangherlini is a Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he is the author of Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories (2014), Talking Trauma (1999), and Interpreting Legend (1994). He has published widely in academic journals, including The Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Folklore, Scandinavian Studies, Danske Studier, PlosOne, Computer and Communications of the Association for Computing Machines. He also acted as co-director of the long program on Culture Analytics at the NSF’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). He is interested in the circulation of stories on and across social networks, and the ways in which stories are used by individuals in their ongoing negotiation of ideology with the groups to which they belong. His current research focuses on computational approaches to problems in the study of folklore, literature and culture. In particular, he is developing generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumor, personal experience narratives, and conspiracy theories. His research has been supported by grants from the NSF, the NIH, the NEH, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and Google. He is a fellow of the American Folklore Society, and a member of the Royal Gustav Adolf Academy (one of the Sweden’s Royal Academies).

The UC Berkeley Folklore Graduate Program joins the American Folklore Society in a Stand against Race-Based Violence and Injustice. To read the full statement, please click here.

On May 19, 2020, the Folklore Department honored the hard work of all our graduating students over Zoom. While we were unable to send off our graduates in person, messages from our chair, Charles Briggs, and other Folklore students created a wonderful commencement that nonetheless represented the spirit of our community. Please join us in celebrating the culmination of all their hard work. We wish them nothing but the best as their become scholars, leaders, innovators, and more.

Presenting the Graduating Folklore Class of 2020:

Jon Cho-Polizzi

Bob Offer-Westort

Cameron Johnson

Leah Simon

And as we wrap up the school year, we would also like to thank our beloved visiting professor Meltem Turkoz. She may have only remained physically with us for a few months, but she will forever be a part of the Berkeley Folklore community for all the support and compassion she has given our students, and the incredible resilience she has shown even during times of crisis. We wish Meltem all the best as she tackles new spaces in the world of folkloristics and beyond.

Héctor Beltrán, a graduate of of program, recently gave an interview about border thinking and his own experiences in graduate school. Have a read here:

https://points.datasociety.net/unsettle-border-thinking-4d0fad788060

Department chair and Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in Folklore, Charles Briggs, has recently published an article about the history of our graduate program at UC Berkeley. His work is published in the December edition of the Folklore Fellows’ Network (accessible below).

http://www.folklorefellows.fi/a-brief-history-of-the-university-of-california-berkeleys-folklore-graduate-program/

Welcome!

The Folklore department will be hosting its open house for prospective students on December 4th 2019. Join us to learn more about the M.A. program requirements and to chat with faculty and current students.

Interested applicants who cannot attend in person may also choose to video chat during the first two sessions. Email folklore_archive@berkeley.edu for more information!

Agenda:

9:15-10:30: Program overview and general Q&A

10:30-12:00: Meet other faculty and graduate students

12:00-2:00: Participation in Anthro 262A (Traditionalities and Modernities) Seminar

2:00-3:00: TBA

The Folklore Department is pleased to welcome Professor Meltem Turkoz to UC Berkeley to teach as a visiting faculty member for Spring 2020.

Her bio reads:

“As a scholar I am interested the way cultural practices become the focus of modification and transaction by state and non-state actors during processes of socio-political change. My book Naming and Nation-Building in Turkey: the 1934 Surname Law (2018) examines the reception of the Surname Law of 1934 through oral history and archival and literary print materials. In documenting the processes of onomastic nation-building, I explore how newly created surnames become attached to their bearers through what Agha calls “discursive regularity” of agents of power and through “traffic habits” (Anderson) within local and national economies of meaning.

My recent work has involved the study of festivals, food activism and utopias, ritual laughter and memory, and refugee-host community projects focusing on oral history, advocacy and cultural programming. I am also developing a project on the practice, theory and technologies of puppetry.  

I was first drawn to the study of verbal arts and narrative in folklore—coming from a previous career as a short story writer and journalist—and came of age as an academic folklorist at the University of Pennsylvania’s program where the historicized study of folklore, nationalism and nation-building dovetailed with theories of performance.

I have a longstanding interest in experiential education and have designed and taught community involvement courses partnered with local directorates of education in Şile, and with communities in Mardin and Istanbul. In other pedagogic involvements, I take part in an ongoing multi-disciplinary educational venture on the Olive, held on the Aegean coast of Turkey. As a writer of fiction and poetry I sometimes take the stage at Istanbul Spoken Word.”

Alan Dundes 2019 Guest Lecture: Professor John McDowell

Ecoperformativity: Expressive Culture at the Crux of Ecological Trauma 

Drawing on speech act theory, this presentation elaborates the concept of ecoperformativity to assess the impact of strategic vernacular discourse in settings of environmental crisis. When certain felicity conditions are met, ecoperformative discourse can shape people’s attitudes, move them to action, and help assuage the trauma of ecological precarity. This talk will address ecoperformativity in two Andean settings where indigenous peoples draw on a spiritual connection to the land in confronting existential threats to their survival.

John Holmes McDowell is Professor of Folklore at Indiana University and former Chair of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology; he has researched speech play, verbal art, ballads, and other forms as instruments of social process in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the United States.

Sponsored by the Berkeley Folklore Program (folklore_archive@bekeley.edu)

Ecoperformativity: Expressive Culture at the Crux of Ecological Trauma Drawing on speech act theory, this presentation elaborates the concept of ecoperformativity to assess the impact of strategic vernacular discourse in settings of environmental crisis. When certain felicity conditions are met, ecoperformative discourse can shape people's attitudes, move them to action, and help assuage the trauma of ecological precarity.

Uploaded by Folklore_Archive Departmental on 2019-04-29.

Uploaded by Folklore_Archive Departmental on 2019-04-26.

Music 243 Transcription and Analysis
TH 2pm - 5pm. 
Location TBA
This graduate seminar will be taught by Professor Ben Brinner.
It is appropriate for those with both significant musical skills and a strong interest in learning about a range of approaches to visual representations of musical sound (from standard notation to various graphic representations), experimenting with those approaches, and debating them in terms of their efficacy and what they foreground or ignore.

Anth C262A: Theories of Traditionality and Modernity
W 12:00 pm - 2:59 pm
221 Kroeber
This course is taught by Professor Charles L. Briggs.
Constructing Tradition: In this seminar we explore the implications of the proposition that “tradition” is a process rather than an object, something that people “do” and “make” rather than “have” or “own.”

Art, Architecture, and Design in the United States (1800 to the Present) (HA 185A)
Tues. Thurs. 11:00-12:30
101 Moffitt
This course is taught by Professor Margaretta Lovell.
Looking at major developments in painting and architecture, sculpture, city planning, design, and photography from Romanticism to Post-modernism, this course addresses art, its social context, and its social power over the last two and a half centuries in what is now the United States. Issues include patronage, audience, technology, and the education of the artist as well as style, cultural expression, and the relationship of “high”art to vernacular, folk, and popular art. This class focuses on the ways in which visual culture incorporates and responds to narratives of personal, community, and national identity.

Sailakshmi Senthil Kumar: Born in Chennai, India but raised in Fremont, CA, Sailakshmi (Nisha) comes to the folklore program after finishing her undergrad in anthropology at Berkeley in the spring of 2019. Her interests lie in diasporic Indian-American communities in the Bay Area and how they conceptualize more taboo forms of health like sexual, reproductive, and women's health. Having worked in Tamil Nadu, India in the winter of her sophomore year of undergrad, she is particularly interested in how notions of taboo cross transnationally to become modified or re-contextualized in new settings through narrative, gossip, and rumor. An avid cook, Sailakshmi also spends her free time attempting various new recipes.

Molly Robinson: Molly joins the Folklore Program to explore the material and cultural histories of the so-called American South. She examines how these histories are brought to life in Gullah figurative painting and other art forms created in the part of the southeastern United States vernacularly dubbed the “Coastal Empire.” These interests issue from a broader concern with how we might learn to see legacies of difference, diasporic identities, and articulations of political desire through representation of Southern bodies in art. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and prior to studying at Berkeley worked as a watercolorist for a real estate company and as a docent at a historic house museum in Savannah, Georgia.

Kathryn Brock: Kathryn received a B.A. in Creative Writing and Music Business from Anderson University in Indiana prior to pursuing an M.A. in Creative Writing at University College Cork in Ireland. There her studies included poetry and folklore pertaining to the Hag of Beara, Brigid, and Sheela-na-gigs. Her primary interests are women’s sexuality, femininity, and reproductive rights in Old and Modern Irish poetry and culture as well as the transformation of female figures in oral tradition and the archaeological record. She is currently studying Modern Irish and plans to conduct archival research in the National Folklore Collection in Dublin and ethnographic work in the West of Ireland.

Julia McKeown: Julia is a non-binary Peace Corps Volunteer currently living in and working with Youth in Development in Morocco. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and minor in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2016. While there, she 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 she is a proud member). In May of 2017 she was honored to participate in the Iowa Summer Writers Workshop with James Galvin at the University of Iowa. She is interested in continuing to explore how those ensnared by dominant narratives find spaces and mediums to create their own stories. In particular she is 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. She is very much enjoying watching these interactions unfold in a country where her integration and language skills allow her to be ever more deeply involved in people’s lives.

Nalin Sindhurprama: Nalin received her BA from Chulalongkorn University in Thai language and literature with a focus on folklore. After graduating, she began researching the two decades that have ensued since the violence of the Khmer Rouge government in neighboring Cambodia. For her MA Thesis, she plans to conduct fieldwork on how Cambodians born after 1979 engage with narratives of the Khmer Rouge years that appear in memoirs, novels, films, comic books, political discourse, and official narratives. Her particular interest lies in how this generation uses media, including social media, to construct "Khmerness" in relation to the 1975-1979 period.