Law is Magic: Freemen of the Land and the Magna Carta in a Beauty Salon A Folklore Society online talk by Joel Conn Tuesday 6 June 2023, 18:00-19:30 BST Magic can transform a bundle of handkerchiefs into a bunch of flowers, or divide a person in half. Law can transform your home into someone else’s...
The 2023 Folklore Society Presidential Address Prof. Owen Davies (University of Hertfordshire) Friday 16 June 2023, 17:30-18:30 ‘A Folklorist Looks at Ice-Cream Vans’ From tales of drugs to enchanting music & monkey’s blood, this tour of the folklore of ice-cream vans will visit some surprising places. The motorized ice-cream van plays a distinctive role in...
A Folklore Society Online Talk by Simon Young Tuesday 20 June, 18:00 BST The ‘Wandering Jew’ was an important figure in Christian myth. Cursed by Christ to walk the earth until the second coming, he frequently, between the 1600s and the 1900s, visited Britain. Fortunately for those interested in folk-lore, these visits were recorded in...
A Brief History of Burial Grounds A Folklore Society online talk by Helen Frisby Tuesday 4 July 2023, 18:00 BST Burial grounds are so much more than simply a practical necessity. Not only do they embody our relationships with the dead, they speak to what it means to be human at all. In this talk,...
‘Folklore, Geography and Environment: Ways of Knowing Water, Landscape and Climate in the Anthropocene’ A Folklore Society Conference Friday 14 to Sunday 16 July 2023 at The Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull, 27 High St, Hull, HU1 1NE, and online Scientific knowledge tells us that the Anthropocene’s climate crisis will bring huge changes to the...
The History of Halloween A Folklore Society Online Talk, by Prof. Ronald Hutton (University of Bristol) Tuesday 18 July 2023, 18:00 BST Halloween is usually regarded as the creepiest festival of the modern year, a celebration of witchcraft, phantoms and images of fear which comes down to us from a remote a murky pagan past....
CALL FOR PAPERS: Saints and Mystics in Legend and Tradition: The Seventeenth Legendary Weekend of The Folklore Society A two-day conference on Saints and Mystics in Legend and Tradition will be held on Saturday 2 and Sunday 3 September 2023 as the seventeenth Legendary Weekend of the Folklore Society, at The Chapter House, St Albans...
‘Folklore and Anthropology in Conversation’: The Seventh Joint Seminar of The Folklore Society and The Royal Anthropological Institute Thursday 26 October, 2023, 10:00-17:00 BST Call for Papers ‘Amazonia: Differing Research Perspectives in Ethnography and Folklore The series ‘Folklore and Anthropology in Conversation’ encourages empirical and conceptual dialogue between the two related disciplines of folklore and...
Fertility, Folklore and the Reproductive Body Tuesday 14 November 2023, 10:00-17:00 CALL FOR PAPERS A free, one-day symposium dedicated to folklore of the reproductive body. Abstracts are invited on any aspect of the folklore of fertility, childbirth, contraception, menstruation, and reproduction. Including, but not limited to, popular knowledge and belief, folk narratives and contemporary legend, vernacular religion, superstitions, rites and rituals,...
Ghosts of the Goldfields A Folklore Society online talk by David Waldron (Federation University) Tuesday 5 December 2023, 19:00 GMT In this talk, Dr David Waldron will discuss his research into ghost beliefs and stories of the 19th-century goldrush in colonial Victoria, Australia. He will draw on his research into ghost stories as a cultural...
More new Folklore Society events coming soon!