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Emerging Folklorists showcases outstanding work done by Missouri college students from 2010-19.
These projects came primarily from folklore courses and capstones; most were presented at Missouri
Folklore Society conferences.
These papers represent a range of topics and approaches, from rigorously quantitative analyses to
humanistic studies that ask to be validated by the reader’s recognition of sound insight and empathetic
understanding. They include oral history, family history, structural linguistics, archival study and a great
deal of fieldwork. Though the disciplines here range widely, we had in mind something comparable to
The Apprentice Historian, a model which the discipline of history provides to showcase
exceptional learners.
So Emerging Folklorists opens with a pre-med student contextualizing lore from her Girl Scout camp.
Next, an avid video gamer analyzes gamer language. The volume’s seventeen essays include a linguistics
student tackling the linguistic structures of Yo Momma jokes, and a student of A.I. using computer
analysis to explore patterns of sounds and grammar in Knock Knock jokes. Another student uses brain-
imaging data to analyze the way subjects processed the humor of memes. An extraordinarily gifted gay
student collects, categorizes, and offers insight into coming out stories. Another researcher focuses on
1990s updates of the Bluebeard motif. A rural student (now a PhD in Literature) explores her county’s
history, including oral accounts of farms and a factory, a Civil War skirmish, the cultural artifacts of
enslaved people. Another from southern Missouri collects stories from people of her grandparents’ generation about racial confrontations in her home town. Many of the essays include appendices–data collected, transcriptions of interviews, etc., valuable in their own right.
Some of these inquiries are in spots naive in the sense art historians use the term–work that shows the
marks of the newcomer, or that may not have the range of historical reference of more senior
practitioners, but work which rides on a freshness and a freedom from the preconceptions which can mark
professionals. These researchers are people still learning how to imagine their audience - they do not
always know what needs to be explained and what does not. But in folklore they have found one of the
places where an undergraduate can make genuine contributions to knowledge.
