Alumni

People who have graduated from the program

Anthony Bak Buccitelli

Visiting Professor (Spring 2021)
Folklore

Caitlin Barbera

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...

Kristine Barrett

Folklore

Prior to joining the folklore program, Kristine Barrett (MA 2023) received her BFA in New Media, Photography, and Art History before taking an MFA in Electronic Music Composition and Recording Media. She is interested in exploring connections between art historical sources, textile practices, and women’s vocal music traditions as a means of deepening and extending women's histories and narratives and ways that they are researched. She has studied Old Norse, Old Irish, and modern Irish and Swedish. A vocalist, choral director, and visual artist, she has performed in a range of...

Lissett Bastidas

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...

Héctor Beltrán

Folklore, 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...

Regina Bendix

Folklore

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...

Naomi Bragin

Folklore

Naomi Bragin is a dancer and Associate 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...

Kate Brock

Folklore

Kate Brock (MA 2022) 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...

Leah Busby

Folklore

Prior to joining the folklore program, Leah Busby (MA 2023) was employed as a lawyer specializing in high-profile wrongful conviction cases, Leah succeeded in freeing three men who had been wrongfully imprisoned for decades. More recently, she has worked as a visual artist and is learning jazz piano. Her creative work led her to a deep interest in altar-making, along with the belief systems, narratives and visual dynamics that surround them. Her research will take her to Cuba and possibly other sites in the Caribbean, where she is interested in exploring how altars—like jazz and...

Lashon Daley

Folklore

Lashon Daley is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature and director of the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature at San Diego State University. Her book project, Black Girl Lit: The Coming of (R)age Performances in Contemporary U.S. Black Girlhood Narratives, 1989-2019, charts how children's literature, film, television, and social media has helped shape our cultural understanding of what it means to be young, Black, and female in the U.S. Lashon received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New...