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Category: Internship program

Photograph of Peter Bartis and former AFC Director, Betsy Peterson, holding a check for funds that Bartis donated to support paid internships at the American Folkife Center. 2017. Photo by Steve Winick.

Announcing a New Donation to the American Folklife Center’s Internship Fund

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

Recently, the American Folklife Center received a generous donation from the estate of Peter Bartis, a former AFC staff member, to support our internship program. In this post, we express our appreciation to the Bartis family and detail the excellent work of our former interns, who were supported by previous financial contributions.

Side by side head and shoulders portraits of two women.

Announcing a New Cohort of AFC Summer Interns

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

The American Folklife Center is pleased to announce the selection of three summer interns who will work on public programs, outreach activities and descriptive access work. One intern comes to us from the Utah State University folklore studies program, and two are supported by the AFC Internship Fund. Hanna Salmon is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines how Palestinian storytellers foster affective atmospheres through their performances. Maggie Jones has just graduated magna cum laude from First Nations University of Canada’s Indigenous Languages Program with a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics. They have an interest in Algonquian languages, Indigenous oral history, language revitalization, and journalism. Melanie Kimball is earning an MA in folklore studies at Utah State University. Her research interests include supernatural legends, folk beliefs, vernacular religion, and ethnomusicology. Her thesis investigates how people use music as an apotropaic and folk remedy for fear. Since 2017, the AFC Internship Fund has supported 12 paid internships. It was started by a generous donation from the late Peter Bartis, a former staff member. As the American Folklife Center approaches its 50th anniversary in 2026, we are committed to building this fund to help train a new generation of cultural workers.

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

It’s Never too Late to be an Ethnomusicologist: A Conversation with AFC Intern Kirk Sullivan, Part II

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

This is a guest post by Folklife Specialist Ann Hoog, who coordinates AFC’s internship program. This is the second in a two-part series stemming from a conversation with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan. Part I was about how he went from having an established career in software engineering to becoming a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology. Today, …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

It’s Never too Late to be an Ethnomusicologist: A Conversation with AFC Intern Kirk Sullivan

Posted by: Nicole Saylor

This is a guest post by Folklife Specialist Ann Hoog, who coordinates AFC’s internship program. This is the first in a two-part series stemming from a conversation with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan. Part II is available at this link. This week I sat down to talk with one of our summer interns, Kirk Sullivan, …