Henry Glassie

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Henry Glassie (born 24 March 1941) College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington, has done fieldwork on five continents and written books on the full range of folkloristic interest, from drama, song, and story to craft, art, and architecture. Three of his books -- Passing the Time in Ballymenone, [1] The Spirit of Folk Art, [2] and Turkish Traditional Art Today [3] -- were named among the "Notable Books of the Year" by The New York Times. Glassie has won many awards for his work, including the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinguished career of humanistic scholarship. [4] A film on his work, directed by Pat Collins and titled Henry Glassie: Field Work, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. [5]

Contents

Life and career

Glassie received his B.A. from Tulane University in 1964, his M.A. from the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1965, and his Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. After serving as the State Folklorist of Pennsylvania and teaching at the Capitol Campus of Pennsylvania State University, Glassie began teaching in the Folklore Institute at Indiana University in 1970. In 1976, he became the chairman of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1988, he returned as a College Professor to Indiana University, where he had appointments in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, American Studies, Central Eurasian Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and India Studies. [6] He retired in 2008.

Glassie has served as president of the American Folklore Society, the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and his local historic preservation organization, Bloomington Restorations Incorporated. He is married to fellow folklorist Pravina Shukla, a professor at Indiana University, who is a teacher and the author of two major books on dress and adornment, The Grace of Four Moons and Costume. Glassie and Shukla co-authored Sacred Art, an ethnographic account of creativity in northeastern Brazil. Glassie has four children and four grandchildren. [7]

Henry Glassie began doing fieldwork on the songs, stories, and architecture of the Southern Appalachian region in 1961. He has since done fieldwork in several regions of the United States, and in Ireland, England, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Nigeria, and Brazil. He published his first scholarly paper, an article on the Appalachian log cabin, in 1963. Since then, he has published over 100 articles and a steady stream of books.

Books by Henry Glassie

Books co-authored by Henry Glassie

Honors and awards

Lectures

Henry Glassie has lectured throughout the United States and Canada, and in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, France, Malta, Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, India, Bangladesh, China, and Japan. [8]

Exhibitions

Consulting

Writings about Glassie

Film about Glassie and his work

Archives

Glassie’s papers, correspondence, and drafts of books, are in the Indiana University Archives. [9]

Glassie’s field recordings from Ireland and the United States are in the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Folklore</span> Expressive culture shared by particular groups

Folklore is the whole of oral traditions shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes tales, myths, legends, proverbs, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. They include material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Folklore studies</span> Branch of anthropology

Folklore studies is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde (German), folkeminner (Norwegian), and folkminnen (Swedish), among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irish folklore</span> Folk culture of Ireland

Irish folklore refers to the folktales, balladry, music, dance, and so forth, ultimately, all of folk culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Folk art</span> Art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople

Folk art covers all forms of visual art made in the context of folk culture. Definitions vary, but generally the objects have practical utility of some kind, rather than being exclusively decorative. The makers of folk art are typically trained within a popular tradition, rather than in the fine art tradition of the culture. There is often overlap, or contested ground with 'naive art'. "Folk art" is not used in regard to traditional societies where ethnographic art continue to be made.

The American Folklore Society (AFS) is the United States (US)-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world, which aims to encourage research, aid in disseminating that research, promote the responsible application of that research, publish various forms of publications, advocate for the continued study and teaching of folklore, etc. The Society is based at Indiana University and has an annual meeting every October. The Society's quarterly publication is the Journal of American Folklore. The current president is Marilyn White.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">I-house</span> Vernacular architectural style

The I-house is a vernacular house type, popular in the United States from the colonial period onward. The I-house was so named in the 1930s by Fred Kniffen, a cultural geographer at Louisiana State University who was a specialist in folk architecture. He identified and analyzed the type in his 1936 study of Louisiana house types.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Dorson</span> American folklorist (1916–1981)

Richard Mercer Dorson was an American folklorist, professor, and director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Dorson has been called the "father of American folklore" and "the dominant force in the study of folklore".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon J. Bronner</span> American historian

Simon J. Bronner is an American folklorist, ethnologist, historian, sociologist, educator, college dean, and author.

The Folklore Society (FLS) is a registered charity under English law based in London, England for the study of folklore. Its office is at 50 Fitzroy Street, London home of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

The Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) is a foundation based in the United States with the avowed objective of advancing Turkish studies at colleges and universities in the United States. Having been founded and provided a grant from the Republic of Turkey in the 1980s, the institute has issued undergraduate scholarships, language study awards, grant money to scholars, and underwritten the holding of workshops. Its work has also attracted controversy by observers who have criticized it as a body held under the sway of the political ideology of the Turkish state, active in the denial of the Armenian genocide and other topics considered taboo, such as the condition of the Kurds in the country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saint Faber</span>

Saint Faber is the patron saint of the Sacred Heart Church in Boho, County Fermanagh and of Monea.

Pravina Shukla is an American folklorist who is Provost Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, Department of American Studies, the Dhar India Studies Program, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is also a consulting curator at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.

John Holmes McDowell is a Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. He also serves as Director of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT) headquartered at Indiana University. Broadly speaking his work is centered on performance and communication as well as the interplay of creativity and tradition. Geographically most of his fieldwork has been in Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Ghana. His interests include Speech play and verbal art; the corrido of Greater Mexico; music, myth, and cosmology in the Andes; ecoperformativity; commemoration; folklorization; ethnopoetics; Latin America; the United States.

Hasan M. El-Shamy is a professor of folklore (folkloristics) in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the African Studies Program at Indiana University. He received a B.A. with honors in Arabic and Islamic studies from Ain-Shams University in Cairo, Egypt in 1959. He then completed an intensive graduate program in psychology and education from Ain-Shams (Heliopolis) University in 1959–1960. Later he received an M.A. in folklore from Indiana University in 1964, as well as a Ph.D. in folklore with interdisciplinary training in folklore, psychology, and anthropology from Indiana University in 1967. El-Shamy is retired and professor emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington.

John Laudun is a folklorist, essayist, and professor at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kay Turner</span>

Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, exhibition curation, and public and academic folklore. She is noted for her feminist writings and performances on subjects such as women’s home altars, fairy tale witches, and historical goddess figures. She co-founded “Girls in the Nose,” a lesbian feminist rock punk band that anticipated riot grrl.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathers Museum of World Cultures</span> World Cultures

Mathers Museum of World Cultures was a museum of ethnography and cultural history that features exhibitions of traditional and folk arts at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. It also offered practicum studies at the university for graduate and undergraduate students. The museum also worked to promote local artists. In 2020, the Mathers Museum officially merged with the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology and was closed for renovations. The combined institutions are now the new Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (IUMAA). Located at 416 North Indiana Avenue, the IUMAA is scheduled to reopen in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Concepts in folk art</span> Folk and traditional arts are rooted in and reflective of the cultural life of a community

Folk and traditional arts are rooted in and reflective of the cultural life of a community. They encompass the body of expressive culture associated with the fields of folklore and cultural heritage. Tangible folk art includes historic objects which are crafted and used within a traditional community. Intangible folk arts include forms such as music, dance and narrative structures. Tangible and intangible folk arts were developed to address a need, and are shaped by generational values derived from family and community, through demonstration, conversation and practice.

Michael Owen Jones is an American Folklorist and Emeritus Professor in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Program at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

MacEdward Leach (1892-1967) was an American folklorist, whose work "greatly influenced the development of folklore as an academic discipline".

References

  1. "Notable Books of the Year". The New York Times. 1982.
  2. "Notable Books of the Year". The New York Times. 1990.
  3. "Notable Books of the Year". The New York Times. 1994.
  4. "Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lectures". American Council of Learned Societies.
  5. Maheux, Michèle. "Henry Glassie: Field Work". TIFF.
  6. Truesdell, Barbara (2008). "A Life in the Field: Henry Glassie and the Study of Material Culture". The Public Historian. 30 (4): 59–87. doi:10.1525/tph.2008.30.4.59.
  7. Jason Baird, Jackson (2009). "Henry Glassie". In Honor of Retiring Faculty. Bloomington: Indiana University. p. 7.
  8. "TIFF: "Henry Glassie: Field Work" Interview w/ Director Pat Collins". Indiewood/Hollywoodn't. 2019-09-11.
  9. "Henry Glassie papers, 1968-2019". webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu. Retrieved 2020-01-05.
  10. "Glassie Northern Ireland Collection". libraries.indiana.edu. 2019-07-15. Retrieved 2020-01-05.