Recently, the American Folklife Center published a new collection from the Occupational Folklife Project, which features 16 interviews with religious workers in Kentucky and Indiana. In this post, Senior Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce interviews folklorist Taylor Dooley Burden, who created the collection with support from an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center.
Recently, the American Folklife Center (AFC) published a new collection for the Occupational Folklife Project, "Poultry Workers in North Carolina," on the website of the Library of Congress. In this post, AFC Senior Folklife Specialist Nancy Groce interviews Dr. Leigh Campoamor, the anthropologist and recipient of the AFC's Archie Green Fellowship who interviewed 18 poultry workers for the collection.
In 2023, the American Folklife Center awarded folklorist Selina Morales with an Archie Green Fellowship to interview traditional healers living and working in Puerto Rico. Morales, in collaboration with filmmaker Alexis Garcia, used the fellowship to create a new Occupational Folklife Project collection, titled “Healing Work in Puerto Rico.” In this post, Morales and Garcia discuss their collection with Dr. Nancy Groce (Senior Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center).
In this post, Nicole Saylor, Director of the American Folklife Center (AFC), highlights the 2024 accomplishments of the AFC. The post demonstrates how 2024 was a busy and productive year for the American Folklife Center, as it continued to meet its mission to document and share the many expressions of human experience to inspire, revitalize, and perpetuate living cultural traditions.
AFC Folklife Specialist Meg Nicholas wheels out some gouda pictures and cheesy stories from the American Folklife Center’s collections to celebrate National Cheese Curd Day.
The American Folklife Center (AFC) has launched the sixth season of the America Works podcast. This season focuses on food and the individuals who grow, harvest, prepare food, as well as those who feed other Americans. Each episode is an excerpt from a longer interview, conducted as part of the AFC's Occupational Folklife Project. In this post, Dr. Nancy Groce details the new season and it's eight episodes.
The American Folklife Center recently posted a new collection of interviews with workers at the Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA), a farmer-owned dairy cooperative in coastal Oregon, to its Occupational Folklife Project website. This post is an interview with Dr. Jared Schmidt, a public folklorist based in Oregon, who conducted the interviews with TCCA workers. In 2021, Schmidt received an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center to undertake this research.
In mid-April, the American Folklife Center posted another noteworthy Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) collection to the Library’s website. We are excited to point out that it was the 50th collection of oral history interviews with contemporary American workers to be made available online. In this post we celebrate the milestone and highlight the contributions of Steve Berkley and Matthew Smith, two of the many hardworking AFC staff members who do the complicated behind-the-scenes work of processing Archie Green Fellows’ fieldwork projects, accessioning them, and making them available to online patrons.
On April 12th, the American Folklife Center posted another Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) collection to the Library’s website. The collection features 15 in-depth interviews documenting the careers and work culture of African American nurses who are members of the Chi Eta Phi Sorority, Incorporated, a renowned historically Black national professional nursing organization founded in 1932. (We are excited to note this was the 50th OFP to be processed and made available to the public – but more on that in an upcoming blog.) To mark the occasion, AFC staff folklorist Nancy Groce interviewed the collection’s creator, Carmen Vaughn-Hewitt, a nurse, oral historian, and Chi Eta Phi member who was awarded a 2021 Archie Green Fellowship from AFC for this research project. Find the interview over at Folklife Today!
