Oral Tradition, 37 (2025):221-22
Monire Akbarpouran is a PhD candidate in the sociology of culture at INRS (Montréal). She earned a doctorate in French literature at Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran, 2017), where her dissertation examined comparative approaches to epic, with particular attention to French and Turkic traditions. In this context, she developed a specific interest in the Book of Dede Korkut and published several papers on the subject. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at CELIS (Université Clermont Auvergne, 2018–2020), during which she prepared Koroğlu du XXIe siècle et les aşıq iraniens (Isis Press, 2021). Her current research focuses on the oral traditions of Iranian ashiqs, exploring issues of legitimacy, performance, and the transformation of epic narratives in contemporary contexts.
Andrew Alter is Honorary Associate Professor in Music Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His primary research is in the Music of South Asia with a focus on traditional music from the Himalaya. He has published two books: Dancing with Devtās: Drums, Power and Possession in the Music of Garhwal, North India (Ashgate 2008), and Mountainous Sound Spaces: Listening to History and Music in the Himalaya (CUP, India 2014).
Dorian Jurić is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington and the President of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association. His writings on oral epic, supernatural legends, nineteenth-century academic paradigms, and the political life of folklore in the contemporary and historical Western Balkans can be found in the journals Folklore, The Journal of American Folklore, Oral Tradition, The Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, The Slavic and East European Journal, The Journal of Indo-European Studies, and Folklorica. His work has also been included in edited volumes published by the Oxford and Exeter University Presses. One day soon, he will write the definitive reference work on the South Slavic vila.
D. R. Purohit was formerly Professor of English and founding director of the Centre for Folk Performing Arts and Culture at H. N. B. Garhwal University, Srinagar, Uttarakhand. Currently he is Adjunct Professor in theatre at the university. He has held a number of prestigious research and teaching appointments including as Visiting Professor at Heidelberg University, Germany (2009), Baden Würtemburg Fellow at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg (2018-19), and National Fellow at the India Institute for Advanced Study, Shimla (2019-21). Purohit has produced more than fifty-six plays, numerous scripts, and is a regular consultant for films. He has been recognized for his contributions to Uttarakhand cultural practice with a Sangit Natak Akademi Award (2021), the Umesh Dobhal Smriti Award (2020), a Garhratna (2023), and the Saraswati Saadhna Samman (2024).
Lameen Souag is a researcher at LACITO (Langues et civilisations à tradition orale) in Paris, affiliated with France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris 3), and the INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales). His research focuses primarily on language change and contact in Africa, seeking historical
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explanations for the emergence of typologically unusual phenomena. His linguistic fieldwork has focused mainly on Korandje, a Songhay language of Algeria, and Siwi, a Berber language of Egypt. He is the author of Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt): A Study in Linguistic Contact (Köppe, 2013).
Tuomas Tammisto is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in political ecology and questions of value. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research in the rural Wide Bay region of New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea on several occasions since 2007 focusing on swidden horticulture and socio-environmental relations, plantation labor, state formation and natural resource extraction. Tammisto works currently as an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University, Finland. (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9767-7832; https://iki.fi/tutam/)
Ana Vukmanović received her Master’s degree in socio-cultural anthropology from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, and a PhD in folkloristics from the Faculty of Philology at the same university. In February 2018, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, Croatia. She has published two monographs: In Search of Spring-Water: The Images of Water in South Slavic Oral Lyric Poetry and The Liminal Beings of Oral Lyric Poetry: Poetic Reflections on the Other in South Slavic Oral Lyric Poetry. Her research interests include folkloristics, the poetics of oral lyric poetry, the anthropology and poetics of space, and oral and written literature in a comparative context.
Blaž Zabel is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He works on the history of scholarship and is especially interested in the historical development of Homeric studies, philology, and comparative literature. He is currently leads two research projects. The first project, Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators (funded by the Slovenian Research Agency), explores the global history of comparative literature, with a particular focus on the philologist Matija Murko. The second, History of Humanities in Slovenia: Internationalisation of Literary Studies, Philology, and Comparative Literature (funded by the University of Ljubljana), brings together a large group of scholars to study the international collaborations of Slovenian literary scholars throughout history.
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