For immediate release October 31, 2006
College Park, MD -- The American Folklore Society has awarded a prestigious book prize to Psyche Williams-Forson, assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland. Dr. Williams-Forson recently published her first book, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, with University of North Carolina Press in summer 2006.
The American Folklore Society has awarded its Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize to Dr. Williams-Forson's Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, acknowledged as a "superior work on women’s traditional, vernacular, or local culture and/or feminist theory and folklore."
Dr. Williams-Forson joined the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland in Fall 2005. An alumna of the American Studies doctoral program, Dr. Williams-Forson has emerged as a leading scholar of material culture studies and is a co-founder of the Material Culture/Visual Culture Research Program Area at the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity (co-sponsored by American Studies).
Founded in 1888, the American Folklore Society is an association of people who create and communicate knowledge about folklore throughout the world. In addition to awarding prizes to outstanding folklore scholarship, the American Folklore Society publishes the quarterly Journal of American Folklore, one of the oldest and most respected folklore journals in the world.
For more information about Dr. Williams-Forson, please visit her faculty Web site at the Department of American Studies. For more information about the American Folklore Society, please visit its Web site at http://www.afsnet.org.
-30-
back to News
