Register Now for David Hopkin’s 2024 FLS Presidential Address

Prof. David Hopkin (University of Oxford) looks at a distinctive tradition of maritime storytelling in The Sailor’s Tale, The Folklore Society Presidential Address 2024, on Tuesday, 17 September 2024, 17:00 BST, online and in-person at their London meeting.

David Hopkin is a social and cultural historian of modern Western Europe (c.1760-c.1914). He works with oral and popular cultural sources – the kind of material left by people who are otherwise underrepresented in the archive. His first monograph Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture 1766-1870 (Gladstone Prize 2002) concentrated on popular prints; his second, Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Katharine Briggs Award 2012) used sources such as ballads, folktales and riddles to reconstruct social interactions. He is currently working on a book about European lacemakers: for more on this project visit the website Lace in Context.

The Folklore Society (FLS) is a learned society devoted to the study of traditional culture in all its forms. It was founded in London in 1878 and was one of the first organisations established in the world for the study of folklore. The term ‘folklore’ describes the overarching concept that holds together a number of aspects of vernacular culture and cultural traditions, and is also the name of the discipline which studies them.