2024 Awardees
Sophie Abramowitz, a writer, researcher, and producer from Brooklyn, New York, engaged with traditional and vernacular American music, received a Parsons Award to support onsite research in AFC collections for the expanded LP reissue of Jailhouse Blues: Women’s a cappella songs from the Parchman Penitentiary, Library of Congress Field Recordings, 1936 and 1939. Her research will provide vital context for the expanded reissue, to be released on the SPINSTER record label.
L. Renée, a Virgina based poet and writer, received a Parsons Award to support her research on Black communities in coal mining and tobacco farming towns of Southwest Virginia and West Virginia. She will spend time at the American Folklife Center researching the George Korson Collection of Songs of Bituminous Coal Miners and the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection as well as other materials identified during her visit. Her research will be used to generate new work for her interdisciplinary manuscript of poems, prose, and archival materials and be infused in her storytelling performances for public audiences.
2023 Awardees
Everardo Reyes (California), a PhD student in ethnomusicology at University of California/Berkeley. To support onsite research in LOC collections about the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz, the American Indian Movement, and the use of music and sound in both.
Lydia Warren (West Virginia), a folklorist at Fairmont State University, to support research on "Preserving the West Virginia Hammered Dulcimer Tradition at the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center.” She will spend time at the Library of Congress researching holdings on hammered dulcimers and hammered dulcimer music.
2022 Awardees
Navajo musician and artist Jeneda Benally received a Parsons Fund Award to bring a team of Indigenous Youth Advisors to the Library to research and create content for the public radio program Indigenous YOUth Nation. The team will work with AFC/Library staff to access collections containing traditional knowledge, discuss the impact of archival materials on their own communities, bring their listeners some of their own cultural stories, and build bridges between generations.
Ethnomusicologist Edward Herbst of Middletown, Connecticut, received a Parson Fund Award to spend several weeks at the Library researching Indonesian materials as part of the 1928 Restoration, Research and Repatriation Project, a collaborative initiative undertaken in cooperation with the Indonesian STIKOM-Bali institute. Funding will enable Herbst to research the Margaret Mead Collection to catalog Balinese traditional masks and other cultural history, and to review never-before-seen Mead-Bateson-Belo film footage.
2021 Awardee
Professor David Font-Navarette, from the City University of New York’s Lehman College, will conduct archival research pertaining to the American Folklife Center’s Lydia Cabrera-Tarafa Collection of Afro-Cuban Music.
2020 Awardees
Joanna Zatteiro from Albuquerque, New Mexico, received a Parsons Award to expand her research on early cowboy songs, focusing particularly on the AFC's Robert Winslow Gordon Adventure Magazine Manuscripts collection; Her research will inform the development of an index to early cowboy songs being compiled as part of her dissertation research.
Kristina Gaddy, a writer and researcher from Baltimore, Maryland, received a Parsons Award to conduct research on the history of the banjo related to her book Well of Souls: Searching for the Banjo’s Lost History. She is particularly interested in exploring the historical role of the banjo as a religious object and developing new narratives placing the banjo at the center of African American religious ritual, religion, and spiritual practices throughout the Americas.
Windborne, a musical ensemble based in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, received a Parsons Award to conduct research on Music of Struggle at the AFC. Research by members of the quartet will assist in the development of a new concert program highlighting the rich musical traditions of movements for social change, particularly those of the northeastern United States.
2019 Awardees
Jaime Arsenault of Greenfield, Massachusetts, who serves as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer as well as the Repatriation Representative and Tribal Archives Director of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, received a Parsons award to continue research in locating and repatriating cultural heritage materials from the White Earth Band held in AFC and Library archives. As the White Earth Band’s main point of contact for consultation with government agencies and museums, she will also be furthering her previous research that was part of the AFC and Washington State University’s Tribal Digital Stewardship Cohort and Mukurtu CMS end-user program in February 2019.
New Mexican musicians Jordan Wax of Santa Fe and Noah Martinez of Albuquerque received funding to research the Library’s Jack Loeffler, Katherine Strain and Arthur L. Campa collections in order to identify historic recordings of Hispanic musicians who are otherwise undocumented and whose repertoire has largely disappeared in New Mexico. In addition to studying Northern New Mexican archival materials, they will draw on their research to re-introduce examples of this traditional repertoire to a new generation of New Mexican musicians through performances of their group, Lone Piñon.
Eric Hung, the Executive Director of the new Music of Asian America Research Center in Burlington, New Jersey, received a Parsons award to conduct research in AFC and Library collections documenting Asian American music ensembles that were active from the 1970s to the 1990s. His research will inform a larger project that seeks to raise the visibility of Asian American communities and their musical contributions to the U.S. by creating a website where these collections and items can be promoted to wider audiences.
2018 Awardees
Folklorists Ann Ferrell (Western Kentucky University) and Diane Goldstein (Indiana University) received funding for a one- week research trip to utilize AFC collections in support of a book-length project exploring key moments in the field of folklore from the late-1960s through the mid-1980s.
Emily Hilliard, West Virginia’s State Folklorist, received support for one-week trip to research AFC’s collection of sound recordings, photographs, field notes, and ephemera related to West Virginia, focusing particularly on archival content related to African Americans and other cultural communities whose “presence and contributions are often marginalized in historical and vernacular culture narratives of the Mountain State.” Her research will inform ongoing and future work of the West Virginia Folklife Program and culminate in a series of multimedia blog posts.
Charlotte Rogers (University of Virginia) received Parsons funding for a trip to the Library to utilize AFC collections in support of her book project Dancing Through the Storm, which focuses on creative cultural expressions–including music, dance, literature, and photography—inspired by and in response to hurricanes and other storms in the Caribbean region.
2017 Awardee
Peter Szok, Professor of History at Texas Christian University received support for "Insurgent Beauty: Native American Art in Modern Panama." He will review the Library's collection of Panamanian newspapers and periodicals to produce a monograph on Panama's Native American art from 1968 to the present, with particular emphasis on in influence of Guna artwork. His research at the Library will supplement his already extensive scholarship on Guna artwork as well as oral histories he has already completed with contemporary Guna artists.
2016 Awardees
Jillian Gould, professor at in the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, to support for her project "The Early Life and WPA Fieldwork of Herbert Halpert (1911-2000)." The award will enable recipient to spend time at the American Folklife Center examining archival records documenting Halpert's early life and fieldwork with the goal of writing an intellectual biography of this important folklore scholar.
Jess Lamar Reece Holler and Jeffrey Paul Nagle, folklorists from the University of Pennsylvania, for their project "Older Than You'd Think, and More Urgent: Legacies of Public Folklore and Cultural Conservation Methodology for the New Public Environmental Humanities." The award enabled them to visit the AFC to research the history, methodological design, reception, and curation of public folklife documentation, and survey projects conducted on environmental cultures from 1970 to the present; explore the emerging interdisciplinary field of public environmental humanities; better understand the rich legacy of public folklore work on environmental humanities studies; and inform best practices and methodologies in designing community-collaborative cultural documentation projects that respond to environmental change.
2015 Awardees
David Blake, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, to support research into Pete Seeger's performances during his 1950s music industry blacklist that began with initial accusations of his Communist ties in 1952 and continued through his House on Un-American Activities Committee testimony in 1955, his conviction of contempt of Congress in 1961, and the reversal of his sentence in 1962. The researcher will examine how Seeger’s college concerts during this period influenced the development of intellectual and critical approaches to folk song as part of the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s.
Cristina Benedetti, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, to support research on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. exploring connections between gatherings and how the historical "layering" of political performances in this space has contributed to its symbolic power. While many scholarly works about the Mall focus on its landscaped, sculpted, and built aspects, Benedetti investigates the ways that everyday people engage with this space, whether in protest, or for tourist, entertainment, commemoration, or leisure activities.
Sita Reddy, Research Associate, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., to support research on the visual materials—including ethnographic films—of Indian yogis or fakirs. Her research focuses on colonial, postcolonial and transnational representations of yoga’s encounters with modernity, and the social practices, interactions, and ethnographic contexts around such representations.
2014 Awardees
Scott Barretta, Oxford, Mississippi, to undertake research on the legendary bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell in preparation for a documentary film. The researcher is particularly interested in reviewing 1968 interviews conducted by Pete Welding that are now part of the Pete Welding Collection in the AFC archive.
Brian Miller, Saint Paul, Minnesota, to research traditional songs and singers from Minnesota recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1924. The recordings are now part of the AFC archive.
2013 Awardees
Maurice Mengel, University of Cologne, Germany, to work with the AFC's large and previously unstudied collection of Romanian materials in the Gheorghe and Eugenie Popescu-Judetz Collection.
Alexandro Hernandez, UCLA, to study rare son jarocho recordings and films in the several divisions of the Library and explore their relationship to social justice movements in Los Angeles.
Michael Largey, Michigan State University, to explore the historical and political roots of ethnographic research done in Haiti during the 1930s.
2012 Awardees
Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Professor of Ethnomusicology at Rutgers University, to support research on the musical life of Chinese Americans, with a focus on Chinatown opera culture in the first half of the 20th century.
Danille Elise Christensen, Virginia Tech University, to support research on the cultural history of home canning and food preservation.
2011 Awardees
David Greely, fiddler from Louisiana, to support research on Cajun and Creole music.
Emily Kader, storyteller from North Carolina, to support research concerning Irish and Appalachian "Jack tales," to encompass similar traditions in the Caribbean and in African American communities in the American South.
2010 Awardees
Cecilia Salvatore, Professor at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, to support a project that will identify and evaluate the Library's institution-wide assets pertaining to the culture and history of Micronesia.
Mark Noonan, Columbia University, to support a project that will analyze regional and chronological variations in Sacred Harp singing practices utilizing the Center's extensive archival collections of shape note hymnals and recordings.
2009 Awardees
Gregory Hansen, Arkansas: to support a research project on the vernacular architecture and social history of Heishman's Mill, a 19th century grist mill located in central Pennsylvania.
Marion S. Jacobsen, New Jersey: to support a research project focusing on the evolution and popularization of the piano accordion in America from 1920 to1960 using the collections of the Library of Congress.
2008 Awardees
Jocelyn Arem, New York: to support a research project focusing on the cultural impact of the 1960s folk revival movement, using the collections of the American Folklife Center.
Barbara Fertig: to support a research project focusing on African American residents of coastal Georgia communities, using the collections of the American Folklife Center.
Cecilia Conway, Appalachian State University: to support a research project focusing on the Beech Mountain, North Carolina, collections at the American Folklife Center.
2007 Awardees
Michael McCoyer: to support his research on levee camps and Mississippi Delta life in the early 20th century using the Coahoma County materials in the Alan Lomax Collection and other Library resources.
Kathleen Ryan: to support her research on "Propaganda, Memory and Oral History in World War II Female Veterans," using Veterans History Project materials and other Library resources.
2006 Awardees
Eileen M. Condon: for research on Puerto Rican traditional music in Dutchess County, New York.
Sydney Hutchinson: to support doctoral work in ethnomusicology at New York University for a research project titled "Analysis of Musical Change in Dominican Merengue Típico".
Linda Goss: for research on African American storytelling traditions.
David Stanley: to research collection materials related to cowboy ballad performers, including correspondence, transcriptions, and ephemera in several Library Divisions.
David Hoffman: to conduct research on symposia, public hearings, position papers and other materials related to US national policy on the topic of indigenous rights and cultural and environmental conservation.
2004 Awardees
Andrea Frierson-Toney: to research African American traditional music from Gee's Bend, Alabama, in the Robert Sonkin Collection. Research on the performance tradition will be adapted into a theatrical production.
2003 Awardee
Nicole Saylor, Wisconsin: to create a web page highlighting the ethnographic fieldwork of Sidney Robertson Cowell (1903-1995) in Wisconsin. This site will be an addition to the Mills Music Library's Helene Stratman-Thomas project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2002 Awardee
No award.
2001 Awardees
Barrett Golding: to support the creation of two public radio programs presenting music and stories from Florida using WPA-era material from the Archive's collections, including an interview with Stetson Kennedy, head of the WPA's Florida project.
Nancy-Jean Seigel: to support her work researching, organizing, and adding to the files of the Helen Hartness Flanders Collection in the Archive of Folk Culture.
Mark Jackson: to support the creation and publication of a CD based on the music and spoken words of John Handcox, a sharecropper and member of the Arkansas-based Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, who was recorded at the Library of Congress in 1937.
2000 Awardees
Larry Polansky: to support research for the publication of work on folksong transcription and notation by the ethnographer Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Anne Laskey and Gail Needleman: to undertake research for educational music textbooks using folksong based on the Kodály method.
1999 Awardees
Susan Lutz: to support for research on a documentary film entitled Sunday Dinner: Food, Land, and Free Time.
Lücel Demirer: to locate representations of Kurdish national identity in the Woodrow Wilson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
1998 Awardees
Carl Lindahl: to fund research on British and Irish American folk tales, later published as Folktales: From the Collections of the Library of Congress.
Jason Baird Jackson and Victoria Lindsay Levine: to support a project focusing on Yuchi Dance Music.
1997 Awardees
William T. Dargan: to fund for research project on African American lining-out hymn performance.
Lucy Long: to support research on the Appalachian plucked dulcimer.
1996 Awardee
Julia Bishop: to support research on The James Madison Carpenter Collection of songs and ballads from the United Kingdom.
