Skip to content

Archive for

May 19

Translation / Transformation Conference

Congratulations to the student organizers who hosted the Translation/Transformation conference last Friday and Saturday (May 16-17) at The Ohio State University. This was a conference organized by the Folklore Student Association at OSU and the Folklore and Ethnomusicology students from Indiana University. It was a wonderful, lively, productive graduate student conference in which faculty from the two programs were asked to serve as panel discussants. The student papers, from those delivered by undergraduates to those offered by seasoned dissertation writers, were uniformly excellent and the OSU students, as local hosts, really rolled out the red carpet for everyone participating. It was a wonderful event, with plenty of time for fruitful discussion and social networking. The faculty participants, including myself, seemed uniformly pleased with, and impressed by, the overall effort. The student organizers clearly worked very hard to make the event a success. Until the link goes away, the conference program can be found online here.

May 8

New Successes for Teri Klassen’s Work in Quilt Studies

Teri Klassen has recently completed her doctoral qualifying exams in folklore here at Indiana University in preparation for a doctoral dissertation focused on the social life of quilts in the United States. She has also now received grant funding for a phase of her project titled “Quilt Styles of West Tennessee Sharecroppers and Tenant Farmers of the Early to Mid 1900s.” Her award is the 2008-2009 Lucy Hilty Research Fund Grant  given by the American Quilt Study Group.

Earlier this year, she curated the exhibition “Family Patterns of Tradition” for Bloomington Restorations Inc. It is an exhibit of 32 quilts made from about 1930 to 2000 by Erdine Brown and two of her daughters, Betty Cates and Faye Doolin, of western Kentucky. The exhibit will be open to the public one more time, from 1-4 p.m., Saturday, May 31, at BRI headquarters, 2920 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington IN 47408. For more information, call BRI (812) 336-0909.