Dr. Mark Helmsing is an assistant professor in Mason's College of Education & Human Development's Teaching and Teacher Education (TATE) Ph.D. program; Advanced Studies in Teaching and Learning (ASTL) M.Ed. program; and Secondary Education (SEED) M.Ed. program. Dr. Helmsing is also an affiliate fa...
The minor in Folklore and Mythology is interdisciplinary and offers students tools to explore the compelling meanings within these seemingly simple, everyday cultural texts, and helps them become more aware of the ways these texts are used by individuals and institutions for various goals. Students s...
Associate Professor of French and Global Affairs. Regional interests: West Africa, Central Africa. Jonathon Repinecz specializes in francophone literatures of West and Central Africa. While he has particular expertise in Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he regularly teaches texts and ...
Debra Lattanzi Shutika is a folklorist specializing in critical race, sense of place and Appalachian studies and contemporary Irish Folklore. She is author of Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico (2011, University of California Press) which won the 2012 Chic...
Folklorist Margaret R. Yocom (PhD, English, U of Massachusetts, Amherst) specializes in traditional narrative, material culture, family folklore, and gender studies. The director of the Northern Virginia Folklife Archive, she established the English Department's Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Co...
Members of the Mason Folklore Community travelled to Ottawa, Canada this past July to participate in the 39th annual Perspectives on Contemporary Legend Conference, hosted by The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR). Graduate student Betty Aquino and alumni Kristina Down...
Undeadness takes many forms. In the American south, some of these forms—like the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead—are eerie (and sometimes campy) physical embodiments as well as reflections of political and social frictions. Undeadness in the south often appears in symbolic,...
This course attempts to chart the uncanny—the inexplicable, the numinous, the spiritual—in our everyday lives. We’ll think about ghosts, spirits, hauntings, visions, communion with the dead, monsters, encounters with the divine, UFOs, dream interpretation, magic, and more, not with the object of prov...
