Bill Ellis Receives AFS Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award

Bill Ellis, emeritus professor of English and American studies at Pennsylvania State University, has received the 2023 AFS Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award.

The AFS Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award aims to acknowledge and recognize the extraordinary, sustained work of folklorists in various contexts throughout our discipline, as they labor, often over the course of many decades, and in diverse situations, to accomplish the goals of the American Folklore Society, i.e., “examining and affirming the diversity of human creativity” and “advocating for respect and mutual understanding of the world’s diverse cultures.”

Ellis’s career record of scholarly accomplishment includes work on Hawthorne, on manga,  on folklore and the Internet, on new religions, and—most notably—on contemporary legend  and belief. In addition, he has written chapters for 16 university-press monographs and published almost 40 articles, and one complete special issue, in peer-reviewed academic journals. 

His early work stretches back to the mid-1970s and was influenced by his teachers Patrick Mullen and Daniel R. Barnes, as well as D. K. Wilgus (an OSU graduate) who assisted his archival research at UCLA.  His dissertation focused on the sentimental “Mother” song genre that has been widespread in US country music. Ellis notes that he was heavily influenced by his dissertation advisor and mentor Daniel R. Barnes’ work on legend, including a keystone article on “The Bosom Serpent” as folk legend influencing literature (Journal of American Folklore, 1972), as well as his piece “Interpreting Urban Legends” (ARV, 1984) which provides an influential discussion of what makes urban legends so distinctively “urban.”  

Ellis authored a number of journal articles on country music, local legends, and “legend-tripping” (the usually adolescent practice of visiting the sites mentioned in local legends) during the early years of his career. Some of this latter work has  become part of the canon on contemporary legend study; e.g., “Legend Tripping in Ohio: A Behavioral Survey” (Papers in Comparative Studies, 1983); “Death By Folklore: Ostention, Contemporary Legend, and Murder” (Western Folklore, 1989); The Vanishing American Legend: Oral Narrative and Textmaking in the 1980s” (Lore & Language, 1989); “The Fast-Food Ghost: A  Study in the Supernatural’s Capacity to Survive Secularization” (Monsters with Iron Teeth: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend III, 1989); and “Satanic Ritual Abuse and Legend Ostension” (Journal of Psychology and Theology, 1992).  Since 2000, his scholarship fully turned toward the effort to interpret the place of  legend and belief in folk and popular culture, and particularly in rumor, gossip, religion, the occult, and contemporary media. This effort has produced five key works: Raising the Devil:  Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Kentucky, 2000); Aliens, Ghosts and Cults: Legends We  Live (Mississippi, 2001), Making A Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a  Global Response to Disaster (a 2002 journal special issue); Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folk  and Popular Culture (Kentucky, 2003); and The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors and Legends  About Immigrants, Terrorists, and Foreign Trade Matter (Oxford, 2020; co-authored with Gary  Alan Fine). 

Ellis was the first to introduce memetics to folkloristics and bring an epidemiological  perspective to the study of legends and jokes. Much as an epidemiologist would study the  origin, distribution, and spread of disease, an epidemiological approach seeks to understand  how certain forms of folklore arise, how and where they spread, and why they spread as they  do. His creative employment of time-dated, situated exchanges and  discussions of disaster jokes on the Internet (not merely on joke sites) allowed him to describe  and understand the crystallization and diffusion of joke cycles about tragedies which are crucial  for formulating any kind of interpretation or explanation. 

For this body of important work, in 2016 Ellis received the Linda Dégh Lifetime  Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to legend scholarship from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR), the major scholarly society for the study of  contemporary legend. Ellis also served as the editor of the ISCLR’s newsletter from 1988 to 1994, a  period recognized, then and now, as the years when this publication made its strongest  contributions to contemporary legend study.