John Miles Foley
Curators' Professor and
William H. Byler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities
Director: The Center for eResearch and The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition
Editor: Oral Tradition
Education: Ph.D. Massachusetts
Interests: Oral Traditions; Homer
Contact: foleyj@missouri.edu
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My specialty is comparative oral traditions, in particular ancient Greek, medieval English, and South Slavic. Over the past fifteen years my major publications have reflected this focus: The Theory of Oral Composition (1988), Traditional Oral Epic (1990), Immanent Art (1991), The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995), Teaching Oral Traditions (1998), Homer's Traditional Art (1999), and How to Read an Oral Poem (2002).
At present I am finishing up an edition and translation of a South Slavic epic (The Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Becirbey) and beginning the editorship of the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Epic ( 2005).
In addition to serving as director of Missouri's Center for Studies in Oral Tradition (www.oraltradition.org) and editor of the journal Oral Tradition (journal.oraltradition.org) and two series of books (Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, at Garland, and Voices in Performance and Text, at the University of Illinois Press), I have recently completed essays for the Cambridge Companion to Homer, a Festschrift in Germany, a collection of essays in South Africa, and Unlocking the Wordhoard, a volume to be published by the University of Toronto Press.
Most of my teaching in Classical Studies has centered around Homer, epic, and mythology; I also teach Anglo-Saxon language and Beowulf in the English department and South Slavic language and poetry in the German and Russian Studies department. Among my favorite teaching assignments is the comparatively oriented course entitled "Oral Tradition," which covers the Iliad or Odyssey along with oral poetry from India, China, Native America, and various parts of Europe from ancient times to the present. In the works is a course on "The History of the Word," which will track that elusive thought-byte from textless times to the electronic present.
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Last modified: Wednesday, 18-Jun-2008 09:44:28 CDT