Prior to studying at Cal, Megan graduated from Boston University, receiving their Bachelor’s in Mass Communications with a Public Relations emphasis along with minors in African American Studies, Medical Anthropology, and Music. While working for a small public relations firm, they joined the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir and have been performing gospel music across the Bay Area ever since. In the folklore program, Megan aims to explore foundational cultural impacts within the African American gospel music tradition. Focusing on themes of personhood, community healing, religion, and...
Before entering the folklore program, Sophia Okada Callahan received her BBA from Parsons the New School for Design in Strategic Design and Management. After graduating, she worked in consumer insights and trend forecasting for various global brands and organizations. While working, she maintained a research-led art practice that took her to residencies in the Philippines and to Berkeley and San Francisco, where she imagined how climate shifts and population migration could impact the future of Filipino convenience stores, the “Sari-Saris,” to how the Japanese American incarceration...
Ciarán was born and raised in Ireland, moving to the Bay Area with his family 25 years ago. After a career spent in the tech industry, he changed direction to pursue his academic ambitions in anthropology and folklore, receiving his BA in anthropology from Cal in 2024. Through the masters folklore program, Ciarán hopes to explore the entanglements between power and folklore—how power structures are reflected in folklore and how regimes of power need to navigate folk groups to maintain legitimacy. He was awarded the 2024 Kroeber Prize for his senior honors thesis.
Meikko has spent nearly a decade as an educator and lifelong learner, specializing in Afrofuturist media and its capacity to capture the hopes and histories of Black Americans. She holds a B.A. in English from UC Santa Barbara, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Mills College.In recent years, Meikko has presented on Afrofuturist pedagogy and curriculum design, highlighting its potential to transform education and empower underserved students. As a master’s student in the Folklore Studies program at UC Berkeley, she is eager to explore how Afrofuturism not only...
Marilyn Petersen joined the Peace Corps in 1996 and served in Uzbekistan for three and a half years. Her main project was teaching English at the University of Bukhara. As her Secondary Project, she chose to collect the national folklore and write a book as an education tool for the schools in Uzbekistan. With the help of her students she collected and translated a comprehensive collection of the national folklore. On her return to the states she wrote a musical based on the spring time holikday, Navruz, which is celebrated in Central Asia and the Middle East by the Islamic community....
Lola holds a BA in Anthropology from Wesleyan University, where she wrote an urban anthropology thesis examining Angelenos' relationships with their cars and the freeway infrastructure of Los Angeles. After working in cultural analysis for a market research company, Lola moved to Galicia in Spain, where she researched everyday practices and usage of public space. She made an ethnographic film on a cured ham shop that serves as a site for the transmission of local folklore. She is interested in themes collective memory, heritage, infrastructure, belonging, and cultural preservation...
Micah's research practice explores how communities, states, and artists craft and deploy Jewish folklore across the diaspora. Drawing on oral history, decolonial psychoanalysis, and the Black radical tradition, they explore how archival absences produce spaces for both reactionary statecraft and fugitive imagination. They hold a BA in History and Urban Studies from Bowdoin College, where they researched diasporic placemaking at three Jewish housing cooperatives in the Bronx. As a Fulbright Scholar based in Morocco, they studied the memory of Muslim-Jewish entanglements in the city of...
