“There are a lot of reasons to move our operations here,” said Tim Lloyd, executive director of the American Folklore Society. “Interactions with faculty, talks, lectures and brown-bag conversations can all be possible now.”
The department of folklore on campus is in collaboration with the department of ethnomusicology. Lloyd said this was one of the reasons for the change of location.
With an eye toward encouraging and strengthening that partnership, last year the IU College of Arts and Sciences made an offer to serve as the institutional home for AFS, which the society’s executive board accepted.
IU-Bloomington was the first campus in the country to offer a doctoral degree in folklore and ethnomusicology. Moreover, the respected society for ethnomusicology scholars also has its national office based on the IU-Bloomington campus.
“The interaction between these two societies, in addition to the others on campus, will do nothing other than benefit our members,” Lloyd said.
Every field in the humanities and social sciences, in the United States, at least, has a society that serves the people in their respected fields, Lloyd said.
“The people in this society, however, are an interesting group of people,” Lloyd said.
Most societies are full of academics such as professors and lecturers, Lloyd said. Within the AFS, this isn’t the norm. Only half of the society’s members come from the academic arena. The others come from what the society calls the “public sector.” This includes those who work at museums, libraries, think tanks and globally at UNESCO, among other careers.
The society was created in 1888 to act as a public forum for folklorists, allowing people who study and communicate knowledge about folklore throughout the world to come together as one group.
The society has helped famous historical writers such as Mark Twain and former U.S. president Rutherford Hayes. Similar to many different societies, a variety of journals are published and an annual meeting is organized, bringing at least 750 scholars together each year.
Last year’s annual meeting was in Santa Fe, New Mexico and this coming year’s annual meeting will be in Long Beach, California.
“Both organizations are hubs and networks in our disciplines all over the world,” said Diane Goldstein, former chair of the folklore and ethnomusicology department and past president of the society.
Bringing scholars to our campus, particularly from the executive board, leaving time to meet with graduate students and sometimes bringing in speakers earlier for the department are some of benefits that Goldstein said she is most looking forward to seeing with this new collaboration.
“This will involve our students in multiple dimensions,” Goldstein said.
There are currently practicums available for both undergraduate and graduate students provided by the society on campus.
In recent years, the society and the IU Library has collaborated on a number of successful scholarly communications initiatives, including the online MLA International Bibliography, the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus, the Open Folklore portal to folklore studies scholarship online and the National Folklore Archives Initiative.
In the past year, AFS has also been a leading participant in the planning for IU’s new Office of Scholarly Publishing, in which the field is taking a prominent place.
“With the new presence of leading people in the field, we are trying to create the most amount of opportunities that we can,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd and current department chair, John McDowell, said creating more programing that involves both faculty members and students is a goal for the society.
“In some sense, this is where the American Folklore Society belongs,” McDowell said. “Indiana is the home of folklore.”
