Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D.
Dillard University, Department of English (2014-2016)

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D., Author & Folklorist, Educator, and Scholar, is an award-winning author of contemporary Creole culture in articles and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina. Most recently, Dr. Saloy received a NEH grant to aid in documenting contemporary Black Creole Culture. As a Folklorist, Saloy documents sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games to discuss the importance of play. As a poet, her first book, Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and tied for a third. She’s written on the significance of the Black Beat poets, on the African American Toasting Tradition, on Black & Creole talk, on life and keeping Creole after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Her new book, Second Line Home is a refreshing collection of poems that captures the day-to-day New Orleans speech, contemplates family dynamics, celebrates New Orleans, and gives insight into the unique culture the world loves. As Professor and Coordinator of English at Dillard University, Saloy was nominated as Best Female Faculty 2014, by HBCU Digest, out of 101 Historically Black Colleges & Universities; also in 2014, she’s honored at best female artist by the Margaret Burroughs/New Orleans Chapter of the National Council of Black Artists; and honored as Exemplary faculty in scholarship and creativity on campus.

Keagan LeJeune, Ph.D.
McNeese State University, Associate Professor of English (2012-2013)

Keagan LeJeune is an Associate Professor of English at McNeese State University. His interests include outlaw legends and the folklore of Louisiana’s Neutral Strip. His book Always for the Underdog: Leather Britches Smith and the Grabow War examines an outlaw legend’s role in encapsulating one sawmill town’s early history.

Jennifer Ritter Guidry
Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette (2015-2017)

Jennifer Ritter Guidry is a lifelong resident of Lafayette and a historian, grant writer and editor. As Assistant Director of UL Lafayette's Center for Louisiana Studies' Programming and Special Projects division, she works with artists of all disciplines, as well as local organizations, regional and state departments and other groups and individuals to develop and enhance cultural, arts and environmental tourism programming throughout Louisiana. She earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

John Sharp, MA
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Center for Louisiana Studies (2012-2013)

John Sharp, an Alabama native who has lived in Lafayette since 2000, received his Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Religious Studies from Auburn University and his Masters Degree in Communication and Folklore from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is a storyteller and filmmaker who was recently awarded the Louisiana Filmmakers Grant by the Louisiana Economic Development. John is currently working on his first full-length documentary film, Dancehalls of South Louisiana.

Marcia Gaudet, Ph.D.
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Ernest Gaines Center (2013-2015)

Ernest Gaines Center

Shane Rasmussen, Ph.D.
Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Louisiana Folklife Center (2015-2017)

Louisiana Folklife Center

Shana Walton, Ph.D.
Nicholls State University, Department of English (2015-2017)

Department of English

Leslie Wade
Louisiana State University, Medieval & Renaissance (2015-2017)

Medieval & Renaissance

Frank de Caro, Ph.D.
Louisiana State University, Professor Emeritus of English

Frank de Caro, Professor Emeritus of English at LSU, lives in New Orleans. Between 1970 and 2001 he taught in both the English and Anthropology Departments at LSU, including a number of folklore courses. He received his PhD in Folklore from Indiana University. His publications include Folklife in Louisiana Photography: Images of Tradition (LSU Press, 1990), Louisiana Sojourns: Travelers’ Tales and Literary Journeys (LSU Press, 1998, with Rosan A. Jordan), Re-Situating Folklore: Folk Contexts in 20th Century Literature and Art (University of Tennessee Press, 2004, with Rosan A. Jordan), and An Anthology of American Folktales and Legends (M. E. Sharpe, 2009).

Susan Roach, Ph.D.
Louisiana Tech University, Department of English (2012-2014)

Susan Roach received her doctorate in Anthropology (Folklore) from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph. A and an M.A. in English from the University of Arkansas. She has been involved in a variety of folklore research and projects, including fieldwork on north Louisiana folklore, curating museum exhibitions, and programming state and national folklife festivals. Her research and publications include On My Way: The Arts of Sarah Albritton, (which won the 1999 Eli Kongas Maranda award from the American Folklore Society Women’s Section), and the Louisiana Quilt Documentation Project (online). From 1998-June 2009, she served as folklorist for the Louisiana Regional Folklife Program at Louisiana Tech University, covering the northeast Louisiana area funded by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts. She is currently the Interim Director of the School of Literature and Language at Louisiana Tech University. Other selected publications include “The Threads of Tradition: Quilts as Multivalent Symbols” in ReSituating Folklore: Folk Contexts and Twentieth Century Literature and Art by F. A. deCaro and Rosan Jordan, (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), “The Journey of David Allen” in Public Folklore by Baron and Spitzer (Smithsonian Institution), “The Kinship Quilt” in Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture by Jordan and Kalick, and Gifts from the Hills: North Central Louisiana Folk Traditions.

Shelly Ingram
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Department of English (2013-2014)

Shelley Ingram is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. After graduating from LSU in 2002, Shelley went on to study folklore and literature at the University of Missouri, where she received her PhD in 2011. Her major research interests include folklore and cultural theory, twentieth-century American literature, southern literature, and critical race theory. She has published on issues of race, folklore, and the novel, and is currently at work on a project titled Ethnographic Fictions: Studies of Folklore and Race in American Literary Culture. In her time at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, she has taught undergraduate and graduate course in folklore and literature, exploring such topics as food and food culture, the American gothic, popular culture, and the literature of Louisiana.

Helen A. Regis
Louisiana State University, Department of Geography & Anthropology (2013-2014)

Helen Regis is a cultural anthropologist at LSU where she teaches Intro to World Ethnography, seminars on Public Culture, and Doing Life History, which teaches students to co-create primary documents for public archives. Regis is involved in several long-term collaborations: Paseos por New Orleans: Latin American Cultural Heritage and Activism, in partnership with CubaNOLA Arts Collective and the National Park Service; Subsistence in Coastal Louisiana, with Shana Walton, in cooperation with social scientists at BOEM and community researchers; research on Jazz Fest, with Walton, is conducted in partnership with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. Regis works at the intersections of culture and commerce, with an interest in performance, policy, public space, and political economy. Books include,The House of Dance & Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis (contributor, with Rachel Breunlin, 2009); Charitable Choices: Religion, Race, and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era (with John Bartkowski, 2004); Fulbe Voices: Marriage, Islam, and Medicine in Northern Cameroon (2003). Recent articles include: “Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map: Race, Place, and Transformation in Desire, New Orleans.” American Anthropologist (with Rachel Breunlin, 2006); “Producing the Folk at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.” Journal of American Folklore (with Shana Walton, 2008); “Can There Be a Critical Collaborative Anthropology? Creativity and Activism in the Seventh Ward” Collaborative Anthropologies (with Rachel Breunlin, 2009); “Building Collaborative Partnerships Through a Lower Ninth Ward Museum.” Practicing Anthropology (with Rachel Breunlin and Ronald W. Lewis, 2011); “Davis, the Irritant: Whiteness in Black Spaces.” Critical Exchange on David Simon’s Treme. Contemporary Political Theory (2011) and “Producing Africa at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.” African Arts (2013).

Solimar Otero, Ph.D.
Louisiana State University, Department of English, Baton Rouge (2011)

Solimar Otero is an Associate Professor of English and a Folklorist at Louisiana State University. Her research centers on Afro-Caribbean spirituality and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature and ethnography. She is the author of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, which was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2010. Her current projects deal with gender and embodiment in Afro-Cuban religious practices and performances. Based on this work, she won a visiting research position at the Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program from 2009 to 2010. She is presently co-editing a volume with historian Toyin Falola, Y?M?JA: Water Goddess, Fluidity and Tradition, that explores the international Yorùbá deity Ye?mo?nja in her multiple manifestations. Dr. Otero is also at work completing her second monograph, Coming Home: Nation, Gender, and Diaspora in Afro-Cuban Religion, which investigates how the representation and expression of gender in Afro-Cuban religions affects Cuban transnationalism.

Carolyn Ware, Ph.D.
Louisiana State University, Department of English (2012-2014)

Carolyn Ware is an Associate Professor of Folklore and English at Louisiana State University. Her research interests include the rural Cajun Mardi and other festival traditions, Croatian folklife in south Louisiana, veterinary culture, vernacular healing and belief traditions, civil rights narratives, and Louisiana folk culture in general. Before coming to LSU in 2001, she worked as a public folklorist for many years, directing the Louisiana Folklife Festival and coordinating the Pine Hills Culture Program in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Her publications include two books–Cajun Mardi Gras Masks with Carl Lindahl, and Cajun Women and Mardi Gras: Reading the Rules Backwards–and a number of journal articles. She was editor of the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany from 2008 to 2012, and is a member of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival’s Folklife Village advisory board.

Keagan LeJeune, Ph.D.
McNeese State University, Associate Professor of English (2012-2013)

Keagan LeJeune is an Associate Professor of English at McNeese State University. His interests include outlaw legends and the folklore of Louisiana’s Neutral Strip. His book Always for the Underdog: Leather Britches Smith and the Grabow War examines an outlaw legend’s role in encapsulating one sawmill town’s early history.