May 11, 2011
News from the Library of Congress
Archie Green Fellowship Recipients

The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (AFC) has awarded its 2011 fellowships.

Receiving Archie Green Fellowships, which are reserved for prominent scholars with a long track record in the study of occupational culture, are Pat Jasper, William Westerman, James Leary, Bucky Halker, Tanya D. Finchum and Juliana M. Nykolaiszyn.

Jasper is an award-winning folklorist, curator and arts administrator, and director of the Houston Folklife and Traditional Arts Program at the Houston Arts Alliance. She has served on the executive board of the American Folklore Society and the advisory boards of the Smithsonian Institution Office of Folklife Programs and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C. and The Fund for Folk Culture. Her fellowship project focuses on documenting the diverse culture of work associated with the Houston port and ship channel.

Westerman’s diverse career includes lecturer at Princeton University, director of the Chicago Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, director of the Program for Immigrant Traditional Artists at the International Institute of New Jersey, and field researcher at the Philadelphia Folklore Project. His fellowship project involves documenting the working lives of South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York City.

Leary and Halker receive a joint fellowship for their study of the cultural traditions of ironworkers in America’s Upper Midwest. They plan to create a variety of end products, including several documentary films. Leary is professor of folklore and Scandinavian studies and director of the folklore program at the University of Wisconsin. Halker is a labor historian whose publications, documentary compact disks, and performances concern labor song and radio, particularly in the American Midwest.

Finchum and Nykolaiszyn are both oral historians and librarians with the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program (OOHRP) at Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater. Their fellowship project is to document, through oral history interviews, the occupational culture and traditions of the American “Big Top” circus in the small town of Hugo, Okla.

The American Folklife Center was created by Congress in 1976 and placed at the Library of Congress to “preserve and present American Folklife” through programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference service, live performance, exhibition, public programs and training. The center includes the American Folklife Center Archive of folk culture, which was established in 1928 and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the United States and around the world. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/folklife/. The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, is the world’s preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing unparalleled collections and integrated resources to Congress and the American people. Many of the Library’s rich resources and treasures may also be accessed through the Library’s website, www.loc.gov, and via interactive exhibitions on a personalized website at myLOC.gov.