In Painting Thangkas on the Tibetan Plateau (University of Washington Press), Xue Ming offers a rare and deeply researched look into the lives of Rebgong thangka painters, whose sacred art is at once devotional, commercial, and political.
Recent Releases
Queer as Folklore (Manchester University Press) travels across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.
Tales for Fairies (Wayne State University Press) is an exploration of how classic fairy tales have been transformed to illuminate and celebrate queer identities.
The Soul of a Folklorist (Indiana University Press) examines how, as folklorists moved toward a perspective that increasingly explored the responsibility of presentation and representation of gender, race, class, and other areas of inequities, the discipline gradually came to understand both the power of its own subject and structures of subordination within the field.
The Winter 2026 JAF: A Global Quarterly is coming soon, with essays about cross cultural encounters, an immigrant laborer, and Perspectives on Crisis and Action—plus obituaries and reviews of recent work in the field.
The Journal of Folklore Research released their special issue, "Latinidades: Reflexivity, Research, and the Creative Process" and is also inaugurating a new section of the journal, "Creative Practice in Process."
Chinese Patchwork (MFA Publications) is the first English-language publication on the art of Chinese patchwork textiles. It includes reproductions of patchwork objects, accompanied by scholarly essays about the tradition and history of the art form, and interviews with makers.
Considering what songs say about texts and what texts say about songs, The Unraveling Heart (Columbia University Press) offers new insight into the importance of labor and gender to aesthetics and develops a novel approach to the concept of the literary.
In Historical Roots of the Wondertale (Indiana University Press), Propp compares folktale structures and content to rituals and customs of aboriginal societies from around the world and with people who were the first to envision religion and myth. This book is freely available as an Open Access monograph.
Custom Made Woman (The University of North Carolina Press) tells the story of Grammy-nominated old-time and bluegrass musician Alice Gerrard through the music, the folk festivals, the kids, and the relationships—both personal and professional—that defined her storied life and career.