Professor of English and Folklore
Barker Center, Room 221
617-495-9567
Office Hours:
Monday 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Wednesday 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Professor of Folklore and English,
Joseph Harris received his B.A. from the University of Georgia and went
on to study at Goethe Universität in Germany and Cambridge University
in England. He earned his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard.
He has taught courses on the
ballad, legend, and theory, as well as surveys of English-language folklore
and Scandinavian and Germanic mythology and heroic legend.
Professor Harris has published
chiefly on Old Norse and Old English literature and mythology, but also
on Anglo-American proverbs and folksong. Prominent among his ongoing interests
are the ritual theory of myth and oral literature; elegy; the Anglo-Saxon
epic Beowulf; and eddic and skaldic poetry. A recent interest in the folklore
of the The American South.
[*Folklore
and Mythology 90a. Studies in Mythology: Seminar]
Catalog Number: 3843
Folklore
and Mythology 90c. Tolkien’s Sources in Folkloristic Perspective
Catalog Number: 4545
*Folklore
and Mythology 97b. Oral Literature and the History of Folkloristics (formerly
*Folklore and Mythology 103)
Catalog Number:
5039
*English 204a. Elegy, Medieval
and Modern: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 1029
*Freshman Seminar 37w. Becoming J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Medieval
Sources
Catalog Number: 1688
His publications include:
“Romancing the Rune: Aspects of Literacy in Early Scandinavian Orality” (1996)
“The Icelandic Sagas” (1998)
“‘Myth to Live By’ in _Sonatorrek_” (1999, in Icelandic)
“The Dossier on Byggvir, God and Hero” (1999)
“The Performance of Old Norse Eddic Poetry” (2000);
“‘Double scene’ and ‘mise en abyme’ in Beowulfian Narrative” (2000)
He edited a dictionary of proverbs (1989), collective volumes on the ballad and oral literature (1991) and on the proverb (1994), and most recently Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (1997).
Department of English and American Literature and Language