Professor Henry Glassie wins second lifetime achievement award

Henry Glassie, college professor emeritus, was recently awarded the American Folklore Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the second honor he has received within the past year.

He was one of two people who received the AFS award this year.

A year ago, Glassie was awarded the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies. This is the highest honor that the AFS bestows and is given to a living senior scholar in recognition of outstanding scholarly achievement during
the course of a career.

Glassie is the third member of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology to be honored.

“The American Folklore Society is my community, and I feel particularly honored to receive this award,” Glassie said in a press release. “Folklorists are students of community and, therefore, an award that comes from my community is a particular honor.

Glassie has written five books about Irish culture, including “Passing the Time in Ballymenone,” which won the Chicago Folklore Prize and the Haney Prize in the Social Sciences and was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times. In 2006, he produced a follow-up work, “The Stars of Ballymenone.”

Glassie began his career as the state folklorist of Pennsylvania, then taught at the University of Pennsylvania and then at IU. At both universities, he served as chairman of the folklore department.

— Margaret Ely