The American Folklore Society congratulates all the honorees and prize recipients named in 2024. For more information on prizes and honors awarded by AFS and its sections, please click here.
American Folklore Society Honors
The following individuals received AFS lifetime achievement awards for 2024:
- Jan Harold Brunvand, emeritus professor of English at the University of Utah, received the AFS Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award.
- Betty Belanus (Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, retired) and Joey Brackner (Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, retired) received the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for lifetime achievement in public folklore.
Other AFS honors went to:
- Andrew Peck (Associate Professor of Strategic Communication, Miami University) received the Chicago Folklore Prize, honoring the best book of folklore scholarship of the year, for Digital Legend and Belief: The Slender Man, Folklore, and the Media (University of Wisconsin Press).
- Shevan Bastian (independent), Juhi Gupta (Alliance for California Traditional Arts), Andrea Marañón Laguna (Indiana University), Mauro Romualdo (Salt Lake Capoeira), and Kateri Smith (Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian) were the recipients of the Gerald L. Davis Presence Pathway Award this year. The Presence Pathway is part of the AFS Gerald L. Davis Grants established in memory of folklorist Gerald L. Davis and in partnership with the AFS Cultural Diversity Committee in 2023. The award provides funding for travel arrangements to support awardees’ presence and participation in the AFS annual meeting.
Fellows of the American Folklore Society
The following individuals were named to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society:
- Ian Brodie
- Guillermo De los Reyes
- Janet C. Gilmore
- Nancy Groce
- Gregory Hansen
- Amy Kitchener
- Debra Lattanzi Shutika
- Ellen E. McHale
- Thomas A. McKean
- Yvonne J. Milspaw
- Clifford R. Murphy
- Kirin Narayan
- Arzu Öztürkmen
- Francisco Vaz da Silva
AFS Section Prizes and Awards
The African American Folklore Section awarded the John Wesley Work III Award, which honors and spotlights applied folklorists, ethnographers, and ethnomusicologists who actively focus on the research, documentation, recording, and highlighting of African American culture through performance, written word, and music in their scholarly works, to Joseph Johnson (Indiana University) for his research “This Ain’t Texas No More!: Beyoncé™ and the Black Banjo Renaissance”.
The Children’s Folklore Section awarded two W. W. Newell Prizes for the best essays by students or emerging scholars on topics in children’s folklore to Drake Hansen (Utah State University) for his research “’Kidnap me pls’: Adolescent Humor, Rumor, and Legend in the Formation of Floptok” and to Gwyn Harris (Indiana University) for her work “Lost Livers, Blurred Boundaries: A Flexible Genre Analysis of Children’s Ghost Stories”.
The Children’s Folklore Section also awarded the Iona and Peter Opie Prize for best recently published scholarly book on children’s folklore to Anna Beresin (University of the Arts) and Julia Bishop (University of Sheffield) for their edited volume Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation (OpenBook Publishers). Sheila Bock (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) received honorable mention for her book Claiming Space: Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards (Utah State University Press).
The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section awarded the Don Yoder Graduate Student Paper Prize to Caroline Stampliaka (University of British Columbia) for her paper “Embodied Wisdom: Traditional Healing and Vernacular Religion in Evros, Greece”.
The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section also awarded the William A. Wilson Undergraduate Student Paper Prize to Maeve Hagerty (University of Oxford) for her paper “Gendered Irish Curse Folklore and the Convergence of Nationalism, Religion, and Resistance, 1850–1940”.
The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section gives the Leonard Norman Primiano Graduate Student Travel Award to students to deliver AFS annual meeting conference presentations on vernacular Catholicism and to participate in the annual meeting in person. This year, Ciara Bernal (The Ohio State University) and Alix Roederer (University of Oregon) were the two recipients of this award.
The Folklore and Science Section awarded the senior category of its Annual Prize to Anna Beresin (University of the Arts) for her research “Techno Mischief: Negotiating Exaggeration Online in Quarantine”, which constitutes a chapter in her co-edited volume Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation that won the Iona and Peter Opie Prize this year.
The Foodways Section awarded the Sue Samuelson Award for best student paper on food and foodways to Salma Valadez-Marquez (University of Oregon) for her research “Quichihuah Ca Ininyollo (We Do It Wholeheartedly): Documenting and Teaching Community through Tamales in Huastec Story and Practice”.
The History and Folklore Section awards the Wayland D. Hand Prize to authors of outstanding books in English that combine historical and folkloristic content and perspectives. This year, the authored category was awarded to Jennifer Eastman Attebery (professor emerita of English, Idaho State University) for her book As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity (University of Wisconsin Press). The edited category was awarded to Toms Ķencis (University of Latvia Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art) for his co-edited volume Folklore and Ethnology in the Soviet Western Borderlands: Socialist in Form, National in Content (Lexington Books).
The Independent Folklorists Section and the Public Programs Section jointly offer an Annual Meeting Award for independent folklorists who work within the field of public programming to attend the annual meeting and to present their work. This year, Selena Morales and William Patterson were the two recipients of this award.
The Independent Folklorists Section also partners with the Women’s Section to offer another Annual Meeting Award for independent folklorists who work on women’s issues to attend the annual meeting and to present their work. Dr. Felicia Black received the award this year for her intriguing and innovative, multi-modal and women-focused exploratory performance and discussion, constructing the nanny as an intercultural spiritual mentor, and centering and raising the voices of a marginalized community of women through theory, performance, and audience participation.
The Mediterranean Studies Section awarded its Fernand Braudel Prize for an outstanding student research paper in Mediterranean folklore to, again, Caroline Stampliaka (University of British Columbia) for her paper “Embodied Wisdom: Traditional Healing and Vernacular Religion in Evros, Greece”. Congratulations, Caroline!
The Nordic-Baltic Section awards its Barbro Klein Prize to a student for an outstanding conference paper, article-length essay, or research-based media production on a folklore topic having to do with Northern Europe and/or the diasporas of its various peoples. This year, Diego Benning Wang (Princeton University) won the prize for his research “Epic Indigenization: Literature and Nation on the Soviet-Finnish Borders under Stalinism”.
The Public Programs Section provides three Archie Green Student Travel Awards to support graduate and undergraduate students who have an interest in working as public folklorists, or who have chosen an area of public folklore as a primary topic of research. This year, the recipients of this award were Madelyn Gereighty (University of Georgia), Chloe Lundrigan (Memorial University of Newfoundland), and Ruchi Rana (University of Delhi).
The Women’s Section awards two Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prizes to recognize superior work on women’s traditional, vernacular, or local culture and/or feminist theory and folklore. This year, Lorena Avellar de Muniagurria (State University of Campinas) and Priscila Cobra (Carimbó Cobra Venenosa) won the professional/non-student category of the prize for their paper “Modes of (R)existence in Brazilian Traditional Cultures: Ancestry and Queerness in the Subversive Performance of the Carimbó Cobra Venenosa” published in the May-December 2023 Issue of the Journal of Folklore Research.
The Women’s Section also awards the Polly Stewart Student Travel Stipend to emerging scholars who show promise of furthering the study of women’s folklore, gender issues in folklore, and/or feminist approaches to the study of folklore. This year, the First Place Prize went to Caroline Brown (University of British Columbia), and the Second Place Prize went to Gavilán Rayna Russom (Goucher College).