On behalf of the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington, I am pleased to have this chance to welcome you to our departmental website and to encourage you to learn more about our unique programs. With campus roots stretching back to the 1920s and boasting approximately 800 alumni presently pursuing the study of vernacular arts and cultures around the world, our department has much to be proud of and much to offer its students and the global communities with whom we collaborate.
Maintaining a strong commitment to the disciplines of ethnomusicology and folklore studies, we also are dedicated to rigorous interdisciplinary work. Outside of our department, our world-renowned faculty maintain ties to the School of Music and to the Departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Anthropology, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Gender Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. In addition, we are actively engaged with the work of the African Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, India Studies, Individualized Major, International Studies, Jewish Studies, Latino Studies, and Mythology Studies programs and of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the East Asian Studies Center, and the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. IUB is a rich center for interdisciplinary and area studies scholarship and our program plays a key bridging role in this context.
Our students--both undergraduate and graduate--are committed to understanding the diversity of human arts and cultures across the breadth of time and space. In pursuit of this mission, they draw upon the remarkable language teaching resources of our campus, where about 77 different languages, from American Sign Language to Zulu are formally taught. Our department also makes teaching and research use of many important collections of cultural artifacts, documents, and recordings curated on the IUB campus. Key repositories on which we draw, and with which we collaborate, include the Archives of African American Music and Culture, the Archives of Traditional Music, the Folklore Archives, the Lilly Library, and the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.
Our undergraduate program provides broad training in both ethnomusicology and folklore studies as parts of a combined B.A. degree. At the M.A. and Ph.D. levels, students focus on one of the two disciplines in depth, but have extensive opportunities to study and work across the full breadth of the department. We are proud of our unique dual degree graduate programs with the School of Library and Information Science, the School of Journalism, and the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. Our department offers training in many areas of academic specialization within folklore studies and ethnomusicology and we provide focused preparation for careers in the public sector. Our department’s remarkable public arts agency--Traditional Arts Indiana--plays a crucial role in our in research and public practice work, as do the archives and museums with whom we partner. As the home to numerous journals, publishing initiatives, and digital humanities projects, we are also a strong center for training in the areas of scholarly communications and new media.
The department’s greatest strengths derive from the people who gather here and who extend our community beyond Bloomington into centers of scholarship and public practice on all inhabited continents. We boast a talented faculty characterized by innovative research and committed teaching and mentoring. Our students come to Bloomington from around the world and bring with them a great diversity of experiences. Together with the donors and staff who support our work, our talented alumni, and the knowledgeable research collaborators with whom we partner, our students and faculty constitute a vibrant scholarly community--one that we hope you will consider joining. If we can help you better understand the work of our unique department, please feel encouraged to be in touch.
Jason Baird Jackson
Associate Professor and Chair |
