As many celebrate the Lunar New Year this weekend, Jonathan H. X. Lee, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, spoke with NBC News to explain traditional beliefs about the Lunar New Year and the Chinese zodiac. Lee, whose research focuses on folklore and religions, provided perspective as we head into the Year of the Rabbit, saying “There is a lot of possibility for prosperity and flourishing, and for peace, really. The rabbit is a very strong symbol for peace."
Folklorists in the News
Descendant, which screened at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society, is available today on Netflix.
Sixth-generation West Virginian Black writer-poet, advocate, entrepreneur, culture worker, and newspaper publisher Crystal Good was the feature and consulting producer on the 2022 “Black in Appalachia” episode of United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell for CNN.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School, led by Arijit Sen, is featured in "Learning to Listen: How a university project to document Milwaukee neighborhood stories has created a ‘network of hope'" in The Progressive Magazine.
Time Magazine reports on Ukrainian museums’ efforts to protect their cultural artifacts from the ongoing Russian invasion, including the American Folklore Society’s efforts to arrange cloud storage space for digital material.
Merrill Kaplan, Associate Professor of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies at The Ohio State University, was recently featured in a Slate Q&A on the topic of “goblin mode” in recent viral media articles.
Folklorist Jeannie B. Thomas’s “SLAP” Test, a rubric for detecting legend and conspiracy theories, was recently featured in Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, a publication of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry published by the Center for Inquiry, under the apt title “Honing Your BS Detector: Conspiracy Theories and the SLAP Test.”)
Invading Russian forces destroyed a museum in Ivankiv, a city northwest of the capital Kyiv, that was home to dozens of works by the Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko on Sunday, according to the Kyiv Independent.
In a recent essay in the The Guardian, Nell Leyshon describes the inspiration and issues of her new play Folk, soon to be staged in London, that explores questions of representation and intellectual property in early 20th-century English folk song collecting. The
Recently in The Guardian, critic Kelefa Sanneh placed Roger Abrahams’ Deep Down in the Jungle at the top of his list of the 10 most important books on musical subcultures. Said Sanneh:“In 1964, a folklorist based in Philadelphia managed a neat trick: