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.
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...
Joining the folklore program after receiving her BA in art with a minor in folklore and popular culture at USC, Nicole finds her academic interests lie in the study of the Afro-Cuban religion Santería (also referred to as Lucumí). Having first been introduced to the religion through an Afro-Cuban dance class during her sophomore year as an undergrad, Nicole has dedicated her time as an MA candidate to the topic. Carried over from her interests in creating identity-based artwork, she aims to focus her research on the results that participation in the practice of orisha dance, and its...
