Archer Taylor Lectures

The Western States Folklore Society (formerly California Folklore Society) holds Annual Meetings to encourage professional and amateur folklorists to meet each other, present papers, and engage in discussions of all aspects of folklore and folklife. The Meetings, usually held on a weekend in April and extending from Friday through Sunday morning, are hosted by different colleges or universities throughout the western states from the Rockies to the Pacific. Information about the next Annual Meeting will appear on this page as plans develop.

One important event in the Society’s Meetings is the invitational Archer Taylor Lecture Series, given by a folklorist of note. The lectures are subsequently published in the Society’s journal, Western Folklore.

To learn more about the Western States Folklore Society, visit its site at http://westernfolklore.org/.

Some of the lectures are collected here. For some personal details of Archer Taylor, read the 1999 lecture.

1981	Perhaps Too Much to Chew?
1988	From Proverb to Belief and Superstition: An Encyclopedic Vision, or The Legend of Archer Taylor and Wayland D. Hand
1990	Personal Narrative: The Family Novel
1992	The German Connection: The Brothers Grimm and the Study of 'Oral' Literature
1994	The "M" Word
1996	The "Let it go to the garlic!": Evil eye and the fertility of women among the Sephardim
1997	Folklore and the Civil Sphere
1998	The End of Folklore
1999	My Summer with Archer, and Some Unfinished Business
2000	The "In lingua veritas" proverbial rhetoric in Victor Klemperer's diaries of the Nazi years (1933-1945)
2001	Pots, Kettles, and Interpretations of Blackness in the Use of Proverbs
2002	Back to the Hearth: The Politics of Reflexivity and Representation in Context
2004	Focusing In: Film and the Survival of Folklore Studies in the 21st Century