I am an ethnographer whose work bridges the fields of folklore, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology and ethnomusicology. I have collaborated with Native American communities in Oklahoma since 1993, when I began a lifelong personal and research relationship with the Yuchi people. My studies concern, most centrally, the nature of customary arts, practices and beliefs and the role that these play in social life. In addition to the ethnography and ethnology of Eastern North America, I am increasingly also pursuing projects exploring emerging issues (often quite contested) in the areas of intellectual property, cultural property and heritage policy. Lastly, most of my career has been spent working as a curator in museum contexts and I remain deeply engaged with research in, and teaching about, museums, especially museums of art and ethnography. [more]

I presently serve as an Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University and am the editor of two scholarly journals. The first, which I have edited since late 2005, is Museum Anthropology, a journal published by the Council for Museum Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. The second, which colleagues and I founded in early 2007, is the open access journal Museum Anthropology Review. In addition to my primary appointment in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, I am an Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies Program and the Cultural Studies Program, all at Indiana University. Thus I am available to work with students in any of these fields. [more]