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This year two Mason folklore graduate students, two faculty members, and numerous alumni presented, supported, and were recognized for their achievements in the field.

The Folklore Roundtable, companion student organization to the folklore program, had a busy fall on campus and coordinated several events in the hopes to get to know the Mason community better.

The Center for Humanities Research's 2023-24 theme calls for literary, cultural, historical, philosophical, artistic, linguistic, anthropological, religious, and archival engagements with the question of disposability. Learn more and apply to be a fellow. Applications due at noon on November 21.

If you found yourself wandering the National Mall this summer during the 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, you would have seen some familiar faces from the Mason Folklore community!

Fulbright scholarships have brought College of Humanities and Social Sciences faculty members to Ghana and Ireland this academic year.

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).

In 1982,  in Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas  law denying school enrollment to undocumented immigrant  school children, thereby ensuring a free K-12 public education for all students regardless of immigration status. Today, some Americans want to overturn Plyler, and some scholars believe that the official opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, laid a foundation for an impending Plyler challenge. The Institute for Immigration Research (IIR) just released a new paper that reviews the Plyler decision, focuses on continuing barriers to education faced by undocumented students, and examines the potential impact of overturning Plyler. 

Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, Daphne Palasi Andreades’s Brown Girls, and Aamina Ahmad’s The Return of Faraz Ali have been named finalists for the Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award.

The committee agreed to award graduate student Sarah Holland for their paper and also recognized fellow graduate student Amanda Ellard’s paper “Cases of Taoist Folkloresque in Popular Chinese Digital Media” with an honorable mention.