Ang DiNardo graduated from the Mason Folklore Program in Fall 2024 and they are already a trailblazer in the folklore world. For starters, in the Mason folklore community they are the first student to officially complete the Folklore Program master’s degree through the Bachelor’s Accelerated Master’s program. In Spring 2024, they also received the CHSS Outstanding English Graduate Award.This road to George Mason’s Folklore Program stardom was a journey 20 years in the making. Before they transitioned into one of our esteemed alumni, Ang began their academic career as a freshman at George Mason in 2004. Unfortunately, they got sick their freshman year and had to leave school for several years. Although, Ang will tell you that they simply suffered the curse of stepping on the seal in front of George’s statue which causes you to not graduate on time.
However, Ang’s love for learning never ceased and they made it a point to take college classes here and there as they worked in retail operations management. Then Covid hit, and they got really bored, so naturally they decided to take a mythology and literature course online through NOVA. They absolutely loved the course, and thought if this instructor can do this for a living, then maybe they can too.
Ang made the decision to go to school full time to finish their degree and in January 2021 they started going to NOVA full time. By the next semester, Ang had taken too many credits with NOVA and transferred to George Mason. They knew they wanted to major in English and that they probably wanted to do folklore. However it wasn’t until they took Folklore and Folklife with Professor Kim Stryker that Ang’s spark alighted, and they knew that they wanted to be a folklorist. Around the same time Ang also joined Folklore Roundtable. Folklore Roundtable is a student organization, where folklore students and other students hold events and discuss folklore related topics. Folklore studies combined everything that they wanted to study in the humanities; sociology, gender studies, literature, and much much more. They decided to get an accelerated master’s in folklore.
The Bachelor Accelerated Master’s program is designed for highly qualified and motivated undergraduates and allows students to apply 12 graduate credits to their undergraduate degree. Students admitted to an accelerated master’s degree program have the opportunity to complete a master’s and a bachelor’s degree in a reduced amount of time, and at a reduced cost.
When asked about why they made their decision, Ang stated: “I just wanted to learn the cool stuff that [the folklore grad students] were learning so that I could keep up with them in conversation. Also being able to do it at undergrad tuition, that was a no-brainer. I knew that I wanted to start taking grad level folklore classes.” Ang reflects fondly on their time in the BAM program saying:
I would love to see more people in the BAM…, I cannot believe how little I paid for such a great education. I would like to see the program get bigger so that Mason can finally be recognized as the folklore powerhouse that it is. We have some of the greatest folklorists on planet earth in our faculty. And I think that we also have some of the greatest future folklorists coming out of our program. I want to see the program get recognized for that.
Ang’s first official BAM class was Folklore, Gender, and Sexuality with Dr. Lisa Gilman. They said about the experience, “That class blew my mind and honestly changed my entire life. I knew immediately that I made the right call.” Around this time, Ang was also coming into their identity as a non-binary person.
Ang, being very passionate about folklore and gender, published their thesis on non-binary identities: “They”-Ifying the Gender Binary: Mason Students, They/Them Pronouns, and Nonbinary Gender Identities. Ang conducted research by interviewing Mason students who use they/them pronouns, and then analyzed those students’ experiences; how they related to other people and how they observed other people relating to them. Ang also conducted digital ethnography to explore non-binary places on the internet.
In midst of all of that, being in the BAM program and in the Mason Folklore Program as a whole, Ang points to various experiences that they would only get here. They served as president of Roundtable in 2023-2024 In 2023 they did an internship at President Lincoln’s Cottage in Petworth. The Lincoln Cottage liked Ang’s work enough that they hired them back the following year as a contractor to finish up a project they were working on during their internship. Ang went to the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting for the past two years in a row, presenting their research the first year and leading a panel their second. They also worked as a graduate faculty assistant to Dr. Ben Gatling helped to copy-edited the folklore journal, Folklorica.
Ang working at their internship at President Lincoln’s Cottage in Petwork, Summer 2023
Ang is out in the real world right now, trying to find a place for themselves as a folklorist, and that journey has not been easy. They expressed that the job market for folklorists is scant as is and mentions previous graduates who have struggled to find employment. Right now they are applying to adjunct faculty positions to teach college students, but they still have aspirations to get a PhD and become, ideally, a folklore professor. When asked what they would like to do more research on, Ang responded that they would like to explore the intersections of disability and folklore, particularly of autistic people and people with ADHD. Even though their future is uncertain, Ang knows that their work is valuable enough to keep going, and because of their experiences in the BAM program, they know which direction to take.
Article by Stephanie Aitken
March 08, 2025