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Previous Folklore Society Events

Folklore, Learning and Literacies conference

  • 21-23/05/2021
  • Friday 21 to Sunday 23 May. from 09:30 to 17:30 GMT
  • Online conference

The rescheduled Folklore, Learning and Literacies conference will be online, Friday 21 to Sunday 23 May 2021 Keynote speaker: Prof. Michael Rosen: ‘”Don’t say that!” – how my parents negotiated Yiddish.’  (Friday 21st) In this talk, Michael Rosen explores how his parents who had both come from Yiddish-speaking households, retained many Yiddish phrases and words...

Folklore and Philately: The Semiotics of Folklore on Postage Stamps

  • 20/04/2021
  • 18:00-19:30
  • Online talk

An online talk for The Folklore Society by James H. Grayson (School of East Asian Studies, Sheffield University). A semiotic analysis of postage stamp designs incorporating folkloric themes will explore how governments use postal imagery for political purposes. Stamps are miniature government documents, the semiotic analysis of which reveals different ways in which governments have...

The Soldier’s Tale: Military Storytelling in Revolutionary Europe

  • 06/04/2021
  • 18:00-19:30
  • Online talk.

An online talk for The Folklore Society, by David Hopkin (Professor of European Social History, University of Oxford) Soldiers’ storytelling inculcated military values. Recorded by folklorists, their tales influenced literary developments in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Oral storytelling is often associated with ‘Mother Goose’ figures, elderly and female, but when folktale collecting started in the aftermath of...

Animating the Life and Times of a Witch Bottle

  • 23/03/21
  • 18:00-19:30
  • Online talk

Exploring the imagined life story of a seventeenth-century witch bottle through animation. An online talk for The Folklore Society. In the summer of 2020 Nigel Jeffries (Museum of London Archaeology), Owen Davies (President of the Folklore Society), and animator Laura-Beth Cowley (University of the West of England) teamed up to explore the imagined life story...

Traditions of Death and Burial, by Helen Frisby

  • 09/03/2021
  • 18:00--19:30
  • Online talk

Traditions of Death and Burial: Exploring English death and burial customs from the medieval era to the present day. an online talk by Dr Helen Frisby Tuesday 9 March 2021 18:00–19:30 GMT Death has been a source of grief and uncertainty for humanity throughout history, but it has also been the inspiration for a plethora...

The Katharine Briggs Lecture and Book Award

  • Tuesday 23 February 2021
  • 17:00
  • online lecture

The Katharine Briggs Lecture, which was postponed from November 2020, will take place as an online lecture via Zoom on Tuesday 23 February 2021 from 17:00. The lecture will be given by Dr Juliette Wood (University of Cardiff): ‘“I Cannot Find the Hanged Man”: Tarot Cards in Fantastic Fiction’. This will be followed by the...

CANCELLED: Folklore, Learning and Literacies

  • 24-26 April 2020
  • UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

CANCELLED: The Annual Conference of the Folklore Society, and Annual General Meeting 2020. Due to the uncertainties arising from the spread of COVID-19 virus we have decided to cancel this year’s conference. We hope to be able to reschedule the conference at a later date   Keynote speaker: Prof. Michael Rosen: “‘Don’t say that!’ –...

The Katharine Briggs Lecture and Book Award 2019

  • Tuesday 29 October 2019
  • 17:30
  • The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB

The Katharine Briggs Lecture 2019 This year’s Katharine Briggs Lecture will be given by Prof. Dr Ulrika Wolf-Knuts (Åbo Akademi University): “What Can We Do With Old Records of Folk Belief? On the Example of Devil Lore” Tuesday 29 October, from 17:30, at The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB. After the lecture, we...