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Recent Faculty News

Folklore core faculty member Doug Blandy has been appointed Vice Provost of Academic Affairs. He has also partnered with professor emerita Kristin Congdon of the University of Central Florida to lead the re-launch of ChinaVine (www.chinavine.org). Traditional and contemporary Chinese art and culture is finding life on the Internet, thanks to a collaborartion to preserve China’s culutral heritage for a new generation. The project is a team effort among the University of Central Florida (UCF), the University of Oregon (UO), Shandong University of Art and Design, Beijing Normal University and other partners in the USA and China. Through ChinaVine, the group is sharing Chinese customs, art, and folk culture using modern technology.

Lisa Gilman, Director of the Folklore Program and Associate Professor of Folklore and English, has been awarded a teaching and research Fulbright Award for the 2012-2013 academic year. Supported by the Fulbright, Prof. Gilman will teach at the University of Mzuzu in Northern Malawi and pursue her new book project “Our Culture is Dying: Dance and the Politics of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Malawi.”  This project investigates UNESCO’s efforts to preserve Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in Malawi, the government’s cultural policy, and everyday people’s perspectives about cultural preservation. It explores international-level discourse about ICH and very localized discourse to yield insights into the intricacies of power dynamics within Malawian communities as people define their cultural practices, struggle with lack of resources, and negotiate cultural change in relationship to globalization and national and international initiatives. Through teaching and research, she will also contribute to the documentation and preservation of Malawian traditional cultural practices.

Dorothee Ostmeier has been invited to participate in the international “Grimm Kongress” at the University of Kassel, Germany, in December 2012. It will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Brothers Grimm first volume of “Children’s and Household Tales.” Ostmeier’s lecture is entitled “Politics of the Marvelous: National Identity and Utopia in Selected Works of the Brothers Grimm.” She will discuss the Grimms’ complex concept of “Poesie” and its political, literary, judical and philosophical connotations, demonstrating their syncretic perspectives towards modernism and anti-modernism, reality, and magic.

Phillip Scher will be in Barbados during the spring term, on a grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He will be continuing his project on the politics of historic preservation and world heritage.

Carol Silverman‘s book Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. She received a 2012 UO Summer Stipend for Humanities and Creative Arts Faculty and also published the article “Producing Sexuality, Music, and Emotion: Gendered Balkan Romani Dilemmas” in  the French journal Etudes Tsiganes. Silverman delivered nine lectures this year, including invited presentations at the Inaugural Romani Studies Conference, University of California, Berkeley;  Opre! A Symposium on Romani (Gypsy) Musics and Cultures at New York University; Musical Margins in the Balkans Conference, University of Chicago; the Gypsy Lore Society, Graz, Austria; and at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Northwestern University and Western Washington University. She also gave papers at the annual  conferences of the American Folklore Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology. In the spring she is conducting research in Macedonia; she also continues to perform and teach Balkan music and work with the NGO Voice of Roma.

During the fall and winter of 2012, Daniel Wojcik’s research on apocalyptic and millennialist beliefs was highlighted in various publications in association with the December 21, 2012 prophecy date (the alleged end of the Maya calendar), with articles appearing in the Oregon Quarterly, “12/21/2012: Doomsday or Deliverance?” and “Music for the End of the World” and Cascade Magazine, “The End of the World as We Know it (Again),” among others. In December 2012, Wojcik conducted fieldwork among pilgrims who travelled to the ancient Maya pyramid at Chichén Itzáand he will publish his findings in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions (Volume 17.2).