The following individuals received AFS lifetime achievement prizes for 2013:
- Lee Haring (formerly of Brooklyn College) received the AFS Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award.
- Peggy Yocom (formerly of George Mason University) received the AFS Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership.
- Jim Griffith (formerly of the University of Arizona) received the Américo Paredes Prize, recognizing excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies.
- Paddy Bowman (Local Learning) and Kay Turner (Brooklyn Arts Council and New York University) shared the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for lifetime achievement in public folklore.
In addition, Laura J. Olson (University of Colorado) and Svetlana Adonyeva (University of St. Petersburg) received the Chicago Folklore Prize, given to the best folklore book of the year, for The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press).
The Fellows of the American Folklore Society named five new members: Robert Baron (New York State Council on the Arts) José Limón (University of Notre Dame), Gerald Pocius (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Kay Turner (Brooklyn Arts Council and New York University), and Michael Ann Williams (Western Kentucky University).
American Folklore Society Section Prize Winners
The Children’s Folklore Section awards the Aesop Prize and Aesop Accolade honorable mentions each year to English-language fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults. The 2013 Aesop Prize went to Deborah Ellis for her book Looks Like Daylight. 2013 Aesop Accolades go to Judy Goldman for her book Whiskers, Tails, & Wings: Animal Folktales from Mexico (illustrated by Fabricio Vandenbroeck), to Rosanne Parry for Written in Stone, and to Odile Weulersse for Nasreddine (illustrated by Rebecca Dautremer). The section also awards the W. W. Newell Prize for the best student essay on a topic in children’s folklore. This year, the prize went to Brant Ellsworth (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg) for his paper “Playing for Change: The Performative Functions of Children’s Piano Play,” and to Semontee Mitra (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg) for her paper “Children Have Their Own World of Being.”
The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section presented its 2013 William A. Wilson Undergraduate Student Paper Prize to Sara Budsock (Susquehanna University) for her paper “He’s One of Ours: Ethnic Preservation in the Slovak Catholic Church of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, 1920-1930.” The section also presented its 2013 Don Yoder Graduate Student Prize to Kinga Povedak (University of Szeged, Hungary) for her paper “Catholicism in Transition: The ‘Religious Beat’ Movement in Hungary.”
The Folklore and Education Section awards the Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowship in memory of folklorists Beverly Robinson, Bea Roeder, and Vaughn Ward to an educator who is engaged in folklore, ethnography, or cultural heritage and K–12 education. Natasha Agrawal, an ESL teacher at Carroll Robbins Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey, was the recipient of the Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowship for 2013. The section also awards the Dorothy Howard Prize to individuals and organizations whose work effectively encourages K–12 educators or students to use or study folklore and folkloristic approaches in all educational environments. There were two recipients of the 2013 Dorothy Howard Prize: Pass It On: Cultural Traditions of the Lower Eastern Shore, A K–12 Curriculum and Activity Guide, by the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art of Salisbury University, and Everyday Music, by Alan Govenar (Documentary Arts, Inc.), with the Everyday Music Education Guide, by Paddy Bowman (Local Learning).
The Foodways Section announces the winners of the 2013 Sue Samuelson Foodways Student Essay Prize. First place was awarded to Diana Garvin (Cornell University) for her paper “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist Intervention.” Second place went to Miriam Ruth Dike (Boston University) for her paper “Exploring Evolving Moroccan Identities in the Diaspora.”
The Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Section awards the Raphael Patai Prize each year to an outstanding unpublished student essay in Jewish folklore and ethnology. The prize honors the eminent folklorist and ethnologist Raphael Patai (1910–1996), who published 600 articles and over 35 books, and taught at many universities in Israel and the United States. The 2013 winner of the prize was Kate A. Reyes for her essay “Demonology and Magic Ritual Texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” completed at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Honorable mentions were awarded to Matthew Singer, doctoral candidate in American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, for his essay “Folk Art from the Peddler’s Bed: The Creative Legacy and Historic Context of Jewish Fraktur Scriveners Justus Epstein and Martin Wetzler,” and to Tsila Zan-Bar Tsur, who recently received her PhD in folklore and traditional Jewish culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for her essay “The Bathhouse and the Mikveh: Transformative Spaces in the Life of Jewish Women in Afghanistan.”
The New Directions in Folklore Section awards the Bill Ellis Prize to the best graduate student essay that combines research and analysis on folklore, broadly construed, and digital culture, popular culture, or new media. This year’s prize was presented to Andrea Glass (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg), for her essay “Blogging for Urban Authenticity and Cultural Authority: The East Village Blog Mafia Battles Bloomberg, The Times, and the Highline.”
The Public Programs Section provides a stipend each year to facilitate travel by a member of the AFS Independent Folklorists’ Section to the AFS annual meeting. Amy Skillman (Goucher College) was the recipient of this year’s Independent Travel Award.
The Women’s Section has awarded its Elli Köngäs-Maranda Professional Prize to Laura J. Olson (University of Colorado) and Svetlana Adonyeva (University of St. Petersburg) for their book The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise. Honorable mention went to Suzanne Seriff (Museum of International Folk Art) for the exhibition Empowering Women: Artisan Cooperatives That Transform Communities. The Elli Köngäs-Maranda Student Prize went to Rachel Gonzalez (Indiana University) for her paper “Quinceañeras as Ephemeral Autobiography: Narrating Latina Lived-Experiences in America’s Heartland.”