Sacred Springs in the Camps (University of Wisconsin Press) explores how legend creates, negotiates, and challenges collective memory; how lived religious practices intersect with the current revival of the Russian Orthodox Church; how politics intertwine with belief; and how the social construction of sacred places affects folk narratives, faith, and local identity.
Recent Releases
Jo Farb Hernández, a writer and curator who has worked in the field of vernacular art environment builders for over five decades, will release a visual documentation of self-taught built environments during U.S. Architecture Week.
Folklorists Ebony Bailey and Lamont Pearley joined the Society of Reluctant Anthropologists (SORA) Podcast to deep dive into the film 'Sinners', exploring its themes of cultural appropriation, historical context, and the interplay of music and desire.
In Banshees, Hags, and Changelings (Syracuse University Press), Molly Ferguson examines how contemporary writers reappraise Irish folklore replete with images of transforming women.
Consisting of seven chapters that document both the history of Nordic folkloristics and the ongoing vivacity of Nordic folklore, Folklore in the Nordic World (University of Wisconsin Press) demonstrates how the informal, traditional elements of a culture/subculture are an integral and vibrant part of the Nordic world.
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.
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.