Visiting Faculty

Taught over 40 years at the Hebrew University, at the Hebrew Literature Department's section for Aggadah and Folk Literature. Her research interests include: Poetics, folk literature, ethnography, everyday life and gender in Rabbinic literature; theory of folklore and folk literature; the proverb genre; folk culture, folklore and multi-culturality in Israel; the Wandering/Eternal Jew figure in the culture of Europe and beyond. She has published many books and numerous articles in these areas.

She has been the incumbent of the Max and Margarethe Grunwald Chair for Folklore and the...

Since 2016, as associate director for the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), folklorist Mary Hufford has worked with colleagues across disciplines and sectors to develop collaboratories for place-based approaches to the study of forest and water issues in Central Appalachian communities. She is especially interested in how conversational genres sustain local imaginaries anchored in commons of forests, soils, and water -- in how stories assemble multi-species communities within narrative ecologies, in how places come to form narrative climax systems. Over the past three...

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...