AFS Prize Winners Recognized at the 2022 Annual Meeting

The American Folklore Society congratulates all the honorees and prize recipients named in 2022. For more information on prizes and honors awarded by AFS and its sections, please click here.

Américo Paredes Prize: Anand Prahlad (Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri)

Awarded by the AFS Committee on Cultural Diversity, the Chicana/Chicano Section, and the Folklore Latino, Latinoamericano, y Caribeño Section with the AFS Executive Board, this award recognizes excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies, or in teaching and encouraging scholars and practitioners to work in their own cultures or communities.

Benjamin A. Botkin Prize: Simon Lichman (Director of the Centre for Creativity and Education in Cultural Heritage, Jerusalem)

The AFS Public Programs Section joins with the AFS Executive Board to recognize significant lifetime achievement in public folklore.

Chicago Folklore Prize: First place to Jerrilyn McGregory (Professor of Folklore in the Department of English, Florida State University), One Grand Noise: Boxing Day in the Anglicized Caribbean World (2022); Second place to Christy Williams (Associate Professor of English at Hawai’i Pacific University), Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales (2021) and Juwen Zhang (Professor of Chinese and Folklore at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon), Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation (2021)

The oldest international award recognizing excellence in folklore scholarship, the Chicago Folklore Prize is awarded to the author of the best book-length work of folklore scholarship for the year.

Judith McCulloh Award for Lifetime Service to the Field: Bill Ivey (Global Cultural Strategies)

The AFS Executive Board recognizes extraordinary contributions in service that advance the visibility and success of the American Folklore Society or the field of folklore studies. The Board intends the award to foreground the critical importance to the health and sustenance of our field of those folklorists who, in addition to their personal accomplishments, make it possible for other folklorists to do their best work.

Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award: Charlotte Wilson Heth (University of California, Los Angeles (Emerita))

This award is bestowed to a living senior scholar in recognition of outstanding scholarly achievement over the course of a career.

Zora Neale Hurston Prize: Jessica Cushenberry (Independent Folklorist) and Jaime Elizabeth Johnston (Louisiana State University)

The prize is given to a graduate or undergraduate student for the best work in any medium—including but not limited to papers, films, sound recordings, or exhibitions—on African American folklore. Cushenberry’s thesis from Utah State University is titled “Home to Harlan: African American Miners’ Children Celebration of Homecoming. Johnston’s thesis from Louisiana State University is “My Mother Read My Dreams: Dream Interpretation in the African Diaspora.”

President’s Award for Meritorious Service: Iryna Voloshyna (Indiana University Bloomington)

This award recognizes exceptional service to the discipline that goes above and beyond one’s usual research, documentation, presentation, or conservation. It honors the recipient’s extraordinary service in care of one’s colleagues and the discipline.

International Stipends: Hüseyin Aksoy (Karamanoglu Mehmetbey University) and Zeme Haidamteu (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi)

AFS offers a limited number of travel stipends on a competitive basis for folklorists and other cultural specialists from outside the United States and Canada.