From the Director.

This October, the New York Folklore Society welcomes our colleagues in the American Folklore Society (AFS) to Buffalo. Held each year, the American Folklore Society's conference draws hundreds of folklorists and allied scholars from throughout the world. This year's conference will draw scholars from Australia, Canada, China, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, India, Korea, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zambia, and nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The folklore, folk arts, and folk culture of New York State will be highlighted through performances, presentations by community scholars, and artists' demonstrations; and Buffalo and Western New York State will provide field trip experiences. New York was the host for the 2002 meeting (Rochester), and a number of that year's planning committee members are working to craft an interesting and engaging meeting this year. The "New York committee" has created a dynamic schedule of presentations and papers. If you are not currently a member of the American Folklore Society, please plan to attend at least part of the Buffalo AFS meeting. The schedule can be found at https://www.afsnet.org/page/2018AM.

The staff and board of the New York Folklore Society are laying plans for the Society's 75th anniversary in 2019. Founded in 1944, the New York Folklore Society was created by folklore scholars who wished to create a vehicle to encourage folklore documentation and preservation in New York State. Those early visionaries were led by Harold Thompson and Louis Jones, who held initial joint appointments as both Presidents of the New York Folklore Society and of the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA), which has been known as the Fenimore Art Museum since 2017. At one point, the membership of the New York Folklore Society eclipsed that of the American Folklore Society (founded in 1888) and included many former students of Harold Thompson and Louis Jones. The Society was founded with a social justice focus, and its founding members were active with early civil rights, progressive education, and leftist politics. They were collectors and popularizers of folklore; they used folklore and folk arts to inform theater, literature, music, and other expressions of American culture and arts. A roster of early New York Folklore Society members reads like a "Who's Who" of folklore, including Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pete Seeger, Moritz Jagendorf of the Ferrar School, Ben Botkin of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, Edith Cutting, Alan Lomax, Ruth Rubin, Carl Carmer, and Norman Studer and Norman Cazden of Camp Woodland. The Society supported a Yorker prize for student writing, and its biannual meeting discussed folklore in education, folk music and the folk revival, civil rights, and the inclusion of immigrant and ethnic expressions. 2019 will be a great year to reflect upon the Society's successes and to lay the foundation for the next 75 years!

Ellen McHale, PhD, Executive Director

New York Folklore Society

nyfs@nyfolklore.org

www.nyfolklore.org