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 and I have been working in partnership with local people and international scholarly collaborators on research related to the circumstances of minority ethnic groups in Southwest China since 2013. My studies concern, most centrally, the nature of customary arts, objects, practices, and beliefs and the role that these play in social life. In addition to the ethnography and ethnology of Eastern North America and the Southeast Asian Massif, I am interested in the ongoing conceptual development within my fields and subfields. As illustration, concepts on which I have recently focused include appropriation, tradition, heritage, and assemblage. 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 world cultures. I am presently a Research Associate of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma. Among my current writing projects is a book—being coauthored with Lijun Zhang—on the basketry industry in upland Southwest China. I am also writing about material culture collections originating among the Indigenous peoples of the present-day Southern United States.
I presently serve on the Board of Directors for the Council for Museum Anthropology and I am President of the American Folklore Society (2026-2027). As an outgrowth of this later role, I am also a Trustee (ex officio) of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. At Indiana University Bloomington, I lead the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory.
I have supported undergraduate and graduate with quite diverse interests, but in recent years most of the students with whom I work have interests related to some mixture of critical heritage studies, museum ethnography, craft studies, material culture studies, and cultural performance studies. Jointly for the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, I regularly teach undergraduate and graduate courses related to museum curatorship, cultural heritage/cultural property, and material culture. I also teach introductory courses for undergraduates and for graduate students in folklore studies. I have twice taught a graduate seminar on the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Masif.
The College of Arts