Cluster focus

The cluster centers on the traditional expressive cultures and folklore of the Upper Midwest’s diverse peoples and their distinctive oral, social, and material expressions, including languages and dialects, narratives, music, dance, festival and ritual, medicine, hand work, foodways, and built environments. Its three faculty members conduct in-depth ethnographic and historical research with widely varied groups, from Native Americans to Midwestern fishing communities to South Asian Americans. Each semester they teach undergraduate and graduate level courses in their areas of expertise such as Theories of Performance and Performativity, Expressive Culture of the American Indian, or Foodways. They also engage in scholarly publication, public outreach, and documentary preservation and access. Each faculty member emphasizes a unique combination of talents and interests representing the spectrum of ethnographic activities: creating and evaluating ethnographic documentary evidence; mining it, or providing resources to mine it, in archival and museum collections; working with campus and off-campus colleagues to present it to the public in exhibits and festivals; framing ethnographic evidence and its public presentation in theoretical arguments to share through publication; and serving on professional councils to guide policy regarding public representation, recognition, and ownership of traditional heritage.

Cluster accomplishments

  • Created an online archival guide to documentary collections of the region’s historic and contemporary folk heritage on the Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Descriptive Finding Aids website as “Public Folk Arts and Folklife Projects of the Upper Midwest.” Currently nine project descriptions are published there, and a dozen more are in progress, including a substantial report from a 2005-2006 survey of public folk arts collections in the Upper Midwest.
  • Furthered on-going public outreach projects, most including UW students, with tribal schools and cultural organizations like the Chippewa Valley Museum, Folklore Village Farm, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the Michigan Traditional Arts Program. These collaborations often involved field research among and public presentation to indigenous peoples, old immigrant populations, and recent Amish, Hmong, and South Asian Indian immigrants to the Upper Midwest.
  • Mentored and guided graduate students working on scholarly research and public folklore and history projects with off-campus organizations that have resulted in successful State and National Register nominations, upcoming publication in the Journal of American Folklore, and public exhibitions.
  • Created and offered new courses, reshaped existing courses, and lectured in colleagues’ courses on topics ranging from American Indian Women, American Indians in Film, and Expressive Culture of the American Indian, to foodways and landscape, food in festival and celebration, ethnographic documentation in Upper Midwestern cultural resource preservation, to theories of performance and performativity. Some courses will offer credit in the College of Letters and Science’s new Service Learning program.
  • Received grants including an A.W. Mellon Grant (2006-2007) for an interdisciplinary effort to organize and facilitate a year-long, campus wide reading group and lecture series on testimony, witnessing, and violence; and a National Endowment of the Arts Infrastructure grant (2006-2007) to develop the CSUMC archiving program.
  • Participated and assisted in planning national and international conferences including the American Folklore Society’s 2006 Milwaukee meeting, UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities 2005 “Future of Folk” biennial humanities festival, and UW-Madison’s 2004 Center for South Asian Conference on international education (Christine Garlough chaired and organized this one). They gave papers, participated in fora, presented on tours, and exhibited posters for these events as well as the 2006 UW-Madison Interdisciplinarity showcase and “TRANS: Visual Culture Conference.”They also presented at the American Society For Ethnohistory meeting at College of William and Mary, the Colloquium on Aboriginal History at University of Winnipeg, the national Preserve America’s Cultural Traditions consortium meeting in Washington, D.C., and the national Laborlore Conversation III in the San Francisco Bay area in 2006. Theresa Schenk is Research Chair and the only U.S. representative of Canada’s Aboriginal Research Council.
  • Published books and articles in a range of scholarly and popular formats, including:
    • Christine Garlough’s “South Asian Women and Criminality: Eclectic Representations of Devi Chaudhurani in Nationalist and Feminist Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007); “The Uses of Folklore/The Uses of Rhetoric: Political Street Plays by Grassroots Feminist Organizations in Gujarat,” Journal of American Folklore, Forthcoming (2007); “Immigration, Diaspora, and American Communities,” and “Unity in Diversity: Indian American Communities” in Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society (Sage, Forthcoming, 2007).
    • Janet Gilmore’s “’Pretty Hungry for Fish’: Fish Foodways among the Commercial Fishing People of the Western Shore of Lake Michigan’s Green Bay,” Midwestern Folklore 29: 1 (2003), “Sagamité andBooya: French Influence in Defining Great Lakes Culinary Heritage,” Material History Review 60 (2004), “Rosemaling” in Encyclopedia of American Folk Art (2004), and “Fish Tug” and “Flatboat” in The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (2007), which all draw from ethnographic fieldwork and archival collections in the Upper Midwest.
    • Theresa Schenk’s William W. Warren: The Life, Letters, and Times of an Ojibwe Leader(Nebraska, 2007), My First Years in the Fur Trade (George Nelson's Wisconsin Journals) (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002), and The Voice of the Crane Echoes Afar (Garland Press, 1997), which draw from important fur trade documents relevant to Wisconsin and Minnesota at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., and College Park, MD, the Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, and the Provincial Archives of Québec.

Cluster structure

Based in two colleges and bridging Communication Arts, Landscape Architecture, Life Sciences Communication, as well as American Indian Studies and Folklore programs, cluster faculty offer courses through and participate in the governance of the interdisciplinary UW-Madison Folklore Program. They serve on the executive committee of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures (CSUMC), recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities funds to further, in cooperation with the Max Kade Institute (MKI), ongoing research, teaching, public programs, and the development of archival collections regarding folklore, languages and cultural pluralism in the region — for which the cluster has played a role in garnering more than $2 million in competitive grant funds for arts and humanities projects. One cluster faculty also serves on the executive committee of American Indian Studies, while another is a core faculty member of the Material Culture Group. Cluster faculty work as well with interdisciplinary scholars in the Ethnic Studies and Communication Technologies cluster, the Center for South Asian Studies, the School of Library and Information Sciences, and the General Library System.

Cluster coordinator, faculty and lead dean

Cluster Coordinators

  • James Leary, Professor, Scandinavian Studies and Folklore; Director, Folklore Program
  • Joseph Salmons, Professor, German; Director, Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures

Cluster Faculty

  • Christine Garlough, Assistant Professor, Communication Arts
  • Janet Gilmore, Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture and Folklore Program
  • Theresa Schenck, Associate Professor, Life Sciences Communication and American Indian Studies

    • Lead Dean