Suyash Kumar Neupane Receives 2025 Warren E. Roberts Prize

The Folk Arts and Material Culture Section of the American Folklore Society congratulates Suyash Kumar Neupane (Indiana University Bloomington) on winning the 2025 Warren E. Roberts Student Project Prize for his essay, “Learning to Cook is Learning to Listen: The Crispy Case of Taruā.”

The review committee found Suyash’s work firmly grounded in folkloric and ethnographic theory, providing a range of scholarly research through which to examine the taruā, in particular in exploration that takes on David Howes’ call for addressing “the multisensoriality embedded in” human experience of the material. Significantly, as one of the readers put it, his work “moves the scholarly conversation on material culture forward in an interesting way” and caused them to “think in new, expansive ways.”

While the Folk Arts and Material Culture Section does not typically award an Honorable Mention for this prize, the review committee thought it important to acknowledge the work by Yael Schuller-Podbilewicz (The University of Texas at Austin), “Steeping Memory: Perspectives on a Family’s Heirloom in the Context of Migration and Jewish Material Culture.” The readers found her essay to be “beautifully and lovingly written” and “squarely centered in material culture” and believe it shares an important narrative of 20th century migration of a Jewish family to the U.S.