Ruth N. Halls Professor, Folklore and Anthropology
Director, Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory
Co-Director, International Folklore Studies Center
**Not accepting new graduate advisees
he/him
I am a folklorist and ethnologist whose teaching and research work bridges the fields of folklore studies, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, ethnohistory, and museum studies. I have collaborated with Native American communities in Oklahoma (USA) 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 pursue 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. I previously served (2005-2009) as the editor of the journal Museum Anthropology and I founded and now edit the open access journal Museum Anthropology Review. While my primary regional engagements are in the southern United States, I have also worked in Southwest China since 2013. Among my current writing projects are a book on the role of community rituals in shaping historical consciousness among the native peoples of Eastern North America and a book—being coauthored with Lijun Zhang—on the basketry industry in upland Southwest China. My current research work focuses on the intersections of museum collections and Indigenous life in the Native South.
The College of Arts