In The Medical Carnivalesque: Folklore among Physicians (Indiana University Press), folklorist Lisa Gabbert demonstrates that the occupational corpus of folklore, humor, and backstage talk found among physicians in hospital contexts reveals remarkable similarities to Bakhtin's descriptions of medieval carnival.
Recent Releases
The Fall 2024 JAF: A Global Quarterly is out, featuring revealing essays addressing issues of professionalism, disability, and conceptions of racial identity, as well as a dozen reviews of recent work in the field.
Whispers in the Echo Chamber: Folklore and the Role of Conspiracy Theory in Contemporary Society calls on folklorists to engage more fully with conspiracy theories. It is edited by Jesse A. Fivecoate and Andrea Kitta and published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Guest Editors by Michelle Banks and Sojin Kim join co-editors Lisa Rathje and Paddy Bowman in announcing the launch of Volume 11 of the Journal of Folklore and Education, On Shifting Ground: Migration, Disruption, and the Changing Contours of Home.
Gunlore: Firearms, Folkways, and Communities is the first book to engage with the many narratives, rituals, folk-speech, customs, art, and handicraft encompassed by gunlore. It is edited by Robert Glenn Howard and Eric A. Eliason and published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Southern writer and folklorist Kelly Kazek tells ten Alabama ghost stories in her new book, Some Nightmares Are Real: The Haunting Truth Behind Alabama’s Supernatural Tales, published by the University of Alabama Press.
Sheila Bock and Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, the newly appointed co-editors of Narrative Culture, announce the publication of the latest issue of the journal.
The Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society is happy to announce the publication of a special issue of Children’s Folklore Review (42.1), entitled “The Texas Children’s Folklore Project” (TCFP).
Bird of Four Hundred Voices: A Mexican American Memoir of Music and Belonging, available August from Heyday Books, follows Eugene Rodriguez of Los Cenzontles as he leads his young students from a California barrio to uncover their ancestral roots.
The JAF editorial team has announced the release of the 2025 Summer issue of JAF: A Global Quarterly (v. 137, no. 545), a special issue on “Folklore Studies and Disability,” which will be available online and arrive in mailboxes soon.