2023 AFS Graduate Fieldwork Grants Awarded to Ruzhica Samokovlija Baruh, Molly McBride, Israt Lipa, and Iryna Voloshyna
AFS is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 AFS Graduate Fieldwork Grant: Ruzhica Samokovlija Baruh, Molly McBride, Israt Lipa and Iryna Voloshyna.
Ruzhica Samokovlija Baruh is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Folklore in Memorial University of Newfoundland. The main objective of her thesis is to explore ajvar, a popular Macedonian relish, as a multifunctional and polysemic symbol that operates in distinct, albeit interconnected social, cultural, and political spheres. In delineating these interactions and meanings, the thesis investigates how this popular food functions as a signifier of Macedonian identity.
Molly McBride is doing Ph.D. in Anthropology at University of Oregon. McBride’s dissertation explores the understudied construction and expression of lesbian identity across generations. In viewing lesbian identity through a folkloric analytical framework, they explore its performance as a community identity that has changed over time. They view the performance of communal, shared lesbian identities as a dynamic folk tradition that has shifted across generations in response to changing political and social landscapes. With most LGBTQ+ folklore scholarship centered on gay men, their research critically foregrounds LGBTQ+ women’s perspectives. With a unique intergenerational approach, McBride seeks to capture the largely unrecorded perspectives of aging lesbians and to understand rising intergenerational tensions among LGBTQ+ women.
Israt Jahan Lipa is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and an active student member of AFS. Her thesis topic focuses on folk beliefs about road accidents and material culture of road users performed in roadside shrines in Bangladesh. Lipa believes her thesis research will contribute to the area of folk belief and material culture study in folklore scholarship emphasizing the context of road accidents of Bangladesh that is comparatively a new area of studying folklore in South Asian context.
Iryna Voloshyna is an international student from Ukraine, pursuing a PhD in Folklore at Indiana University, with minors in Ethnomusicology and Russian and East European Studies. For her doctoral dissertation, she is researching the history and current state of the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of North America. The Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus (UBC), a Ukrainian folk music ensemble, was formed in 1918 in the city of Poltava (Ukraine) by Hnat Hotkevych. Bandura is a pluck string Ukrainian traditional instrument with 56-60 strings.
The AFS Graduate Fieldwork Grant is a five-year program to support ethnographic fieldwork by graduate students, made possible thanks to a generous gift from the Noyes-Krippendorf Fund of the Columbus Foundation. Learn more about the grant here.
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