Dear Visitors and Prospective Students:

Welcome to the virtual home of the Berkeley Folklore Program, a creative and truly international center for scholarship and academic training that focuses on the relationship between traditionality and modernity in contemporary research and social life, the historical emergence of traditional cultural forms, and the importance of perspectives on folklore in shaping political and social projects.

The Program was established in the early 1960s by William Bascom and Alan Dundes, and the M.A. Program in Folklore welcomed its first graduate students in 1965. For four decades, Professor Dundes and his colleagues provided hundreds of students each year with an inspiring undergraduate introduction to folkloristics, a rigorous foundation for graduate study at the M.A. level, and doctoral training in conjunction with Berkeley departments in the humanities or social sciences or the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program. Professor Dundes had a tremendous impact on the field through his voluminous books and articles as well as the vast ranks of his former students, who include many current leaders in the discipline. His untimely death in 2005 deprived us all of a colleague, friend, and mentor.

I had the privilege of becoming the director of the Program in August of 2005, assuming the Distinguished Chair that bears Alan Dundes’ name. Berkeley has made it absolutely clear that it wishes to remain one of the leading centers in the world for research and teaching in this area. Thanks to commitments on the part of Berkeley faculty and students, the Department of Anthropology (which houses and supports the Program), and the Berkeley administration, folklore scholarship’s future at Berkeley is bright.

One of the main features of the Program is its broad international focus. A major goal is to create dialogues between scholars and students based in a diversity of communities within the United States and Europe and colleagues in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, thereby helping to decolonize folkloristics and transcend its Eurocentric roots. This academic year we are proud to include Galit Hasan-Rokem from Israel (Fall semesters of 2006 and 2007), Sadhana Naithani of India (Spring semester of 2007), and Rahile Dawut of China (Spring semester 2007) as Visiting Faculty. The Program’s pedagogical and research foci include colonialism and folklore, cosmopolitanism and vernacularism, globalization, neoliberalism, global regimes of traditional intellectual property, and the international division of cultural labor, as well as many of the subjects and genres that have formed mainstays of research in the field. 

Second, the Folklore Program works in close cooperation with Berkeley’s outstanding faculties in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary and area/international studies programs and with the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum. As a result, we are particularly strong in the following areas:

• Critical Theories of Traditionalities and Modernities
• Ethnomusicology
• Medicine and the Body
• Folk Art and Materiality
• Performance Studies
• Gender and Sexuality
• Race and Coloniality
• Narrative and Discourse Analysis
• Areal concentrations on Africa, Asia, Celtic, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East, Scandinavia, and Slavic/East European/Eurasian