CONTRIBUTOR:

Dan Ben-Amos

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Professor of Folklore & Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

DEPARTMENT:

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

INSTITUTION:

University of Pennsylvania

BIOGRAPHY:

Dan Ben-Amos is a folklorist who studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Indiana University at Bloomington and is teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of the series “Folklore Studies in Translation" (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, and Indiana University Press), and the “Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology" (Wayne State University Press). He conducted research among the Edo people of Nigeria and in Jewish folklore. In addition to many articles, he published Sweet Words: Storytelling Events in Benin; Folklore in Context: Essays; Jewish Folk Literature [Hebrew], translated In Praise of the Baal Shem Folklore: the Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism (with Jerome R. Mintz) and edited Folklore Genres; Folklore: Performance and Communication (with Kenneth S. Goldstein); Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Liliane Weissberg); Folktales of the Jews: Volume 1: Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion, (winner of the 2006 National Jewish Book Award's Sephardic Culture category); Folktales of the Jews, volume 2: Tales from Eastern Europe, and Folktales of the Jews, Volume 3: Tales from Arab Lands.