News from the editors of Folklore Forum:

Folklore Forum special issue Folklore of East Asia, 38:1 (200 is Now Available Online

Folklore Forum is pleased to announce that we have both a new website, www.folkloreforum.net, and a new issue with which to christen it—Folklore of East Asia.

Folklore of East Asia is a tribute to Korean scholar Roger L. Janelli, who retired from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2007 after 32 years of distinguished scholarship. The issue includes four new articles from up and coming scholars that reflect well the cross-disciplinary interests and contributions of Janelli, as well as a farewell interview with Janelli himself.

Please visit our new website and join us in honoring the work of Roger L. Janelli.

Don’t forget—Folklore Forum can now be found at www.folkloreforum.net.

Sincerely,
The 47 Editors

About Folklore Forum

Folklore Forum is a space for the free exchange of ideas on the cutting edge of folklore, folklife and ethnomusicology, a space where up-and-coming scholars can interrogate existing paradigms and cultivate a rich intellectual landscape with a multi-disciplinary perspective. Folklore Forum is managed along with Trickster Press, a not-for-profit folklore publishing house, through Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications.

I am very pleased to announce the official launch of Museum Anthropology Review as a part of IUScholarWorks Journals. In its new home with its new publisher–the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries–MAR will be using Open Journal Systems software, the leading software tool for the complete publication of open access scholarly journals.  Read all about it on the MAR WordPress site and find the press release at IU Media Relations here. See the journal itself here. Please consider registering with the journal. Its free, it brings benefits to you, and it helps us demonstrate that the journal has a large and growing user base.

IU Symposium on Dress and Adornment
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Call for Papers

Dress and adornment in 19th-century women’s fashion will be explored in an exhibit at the Wylie House Museum during the months of April and May.  Wylie family letters, fashion publications of the time, photographs, and later scholarship are used to put garments and accessories from the Sage Collection and the Wylie House Museum into context.  Wylie House visitors can explore timeless topics such as gendered roles, body image, trend transmission, and technology’s effects on fashion in this exhibit installed throughout the rooms of this historic house museum.

In conjunction with the exhibit at the Wylie House, The Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology presents the IU Symposium on Dress and Adornment to be held on Friday, April 18 and Saturday, April 19.  On Friday at 3 p.m., participants are invited to the Wylie House for a curator’s discussion of the exhibit to kick off the symposium.  On Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., faculty and students will present papers on the topics of dress and adornment. These presentations will take place at the Indiana University Memorial Union.

We invite paper abstracts on any topic of dress and adornment. Please submit a 250-word abstract that characterizes the twenty-minute oral presentation you propose to give at the symposium on April 19. Abstracts should accompany a short personal statement about you and your interests. Please email abstracts and personal statements as Word or Rich Text attachments to Suzanne Ingalsbe at sgodby@indiana.edu by February 29, 2008.

We hope to see you all at the Wylie House on Friday and at the symposium on Saturday.

Jason Jackson, Suzanne Ingalsbe, and Pravina Shukla, Symposium Organizers

Congratulations to Flory Gingging on the publication of her paper “”I Lost My Head in Borneo”: Tourism and the Refashioning of the Headhunting Narrative in Sabah, Malaysia.”
as the lead article in the new issue of Cultural Analysis (volume 6, 2007). It is a major paper made even more interesting in publication by the detailed commentaries provided by two very prominent scholars in the field–Beth Conklin and Cristina Bacchilega. Flory’s paper began as an fine essay in the Contesting Culture as Property seminar I taught in 2004. Congratulations to Flory and to the excellent folks who are working to build and sustain a major open access journal for folklore and anthropology.

Congratulations to Xiaohong Chen on the appearance of her review of the book The Flood Myths of Early China by Mark Lewis in JFRR. Find Xiaohong’s review online here.

IU Folklore graduate students Teri Klassen and Selina Morales gave very fine papers this morning during the Conversations: 2007 POAET Grantees Report on their Research conference here on campus. POAET stands for Project on African Expressive Traditions and is a initiative to support research on the arts of Africa and the African diaspora by IU graduate students and faculty. POAET is directed by IU professor of comparative literature Eileen Julien.

Teri and Selina each benefited from POAET grants and each gave wonderful accounts of the fieldwork that they conducted last summer. Teri’s project focused on the nature of quilting among African American and European American women in two southern communities, one in Tennessee, the other in Alabama. Teri’s presentation and her POAET project are part of a larger doctoral research effort examining the complexities of American quilting across space, time, and sociocultural diversites. Selina’s paper considered aspects of her larger M.A. research and exhibition project on botánicas in New York City. This work will result in a major exhibition being curated by Selina and staged by the Mathers Museum. (Learn more about her project on her weblog, here.)

Congratulations to both Teri and Selina for their fine efforts.

FYI:  Museum Anthropology has a new official webpage on the site of its publisher, Wiley-Blackwell.  Find it here.

Following closely on the heels of Gabe McGuire’s recent M.A. Thesis defense, Jeremy Stoll, also a graduate student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at Indiana, has completed his M.A. with a successful defense last friday.  His thesis, titled: “Through the Page Darkly: Japanese Comic Art and Vernacular Religion” examines the culture history of comic art in Japan in route to an exploration of Japanese worldview, particularly regarding questions of human-environmental relationships. Congratulations Jeremy!

IU doctoral student in anthropology Matthew Bradley will be presenting a paper in what looks like an amazing, marathon panel on “Mississippian and Contact Period Archaeology” at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Knoxville. His paper is titled “What Gabriel Arthur Saw” and he will be sharing the program with many leading scholars on the the archaeology and history of the native Southeast of North America. Find the conference program here. Matthew’s work focuses on the language, culture and long-term history of his home community of Cherokee, North Carolina.

Congratulations to IU folklore graduate student Gabriel McGuire, who successfully defended his M.A. thesis on this past Friday. Gabe’s topic was “A System of Affinity: Research in the Line of Morgan’s Progression from Ancient Society through Engels to Soviet Ethnography.” The study explores the way that Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological work came to have such a powerful conditioning effect on Soviet ethnography in the wake of Friedrich Engels’ reworking of Morgan’s ideas. Gabe’s project, which caused him to confront Morgan’s legacy in both American and Soviet scholarship, as well as significant chunks of American and Russian intellectual history more broadly, is an outgrowth of broader work he has been doing in preparation for soon-to-be undertaken doctoral fieldwork in Kazakhstan.