Hasan M. El-Shamy (1938–2026)

Folklorist Hasan M. El-Shamy died peacefully on August 16, 2026 in Bloomington, Indiana. He was eighty-eight.

Hasan was born in Cairo, Egypt. He completed his B.A. in Arabic and Islamic studies at Ain Shams University in 1959. A year later, he received a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue graduate studies in folklore at Indiana University (IU). Integrating psychology, anthropology, and folkloristics, his dissertation rethought folklore vis-à-vis social learning theory and considered the experiences of Egyptian immigrants in New York.

Hasan completed his doctorate in 1967 and—after a period of teaching sociology and anthropology at Morehead State University and directing the folklore archives in Cairo—returned to Bloomington in 1972. After 41 years of teaching, research, and service in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU, he became Professor Emeritus of Folklore in 2013.

Hasan’s work The Folktales of Egypt won the Chicago Folklore Prize for 1980. His numerous scholarly contributions also include Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification (1995), Tales Arab Women Tell and the Behavioral Patterns They Portray (1999), Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index (2004), A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights (2006), Religion among the Folk in Egypt (2008) and so on. Among the many honors he received in his distinguished career was his election to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society.

A full obituary and any details regarding a service in honor of Dr. El-Shamy will be shared through the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. To learn more about Hasan’s work in the field of folklore studies, please read this scholarly memorial by current AFS President and IU faculty member Jason Baird Jackson.