The Committee on Degrees in Folklore & Mythology

Source: https://folkmyth.fas.harvard.edu/ Parent: https://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/departments-degree-programs

Water Lore: An elemental approach to folklore and mythology

F&M Symposium on April 11, 2026, 8:30am-6:30pm - See Events for details

GENED 1196. The Artfulness of Everyday Life (Intro to Folklore & Mythology)

Fall Term 2024. Mon & Wed 1:30-2:45pm. For more information contact Dr. Sarah Craycraft

FM 140. Messages from beyond the Mountains of Darkness: Introduction to Jewish Magic and Folklore

Fall Term 2024. Thurs 12:45-2:45pm. For more information contact instructor Daniel Frim

FM 176. Tattoo: Histories and Practices

Fall Term 2024. Tues., 3:00 - 5:00pm, Warren House 102. For more information contact Dr. Felicity Lufkin.

CELTIC 101. Irish Heroic Saga

Fall term 2024. Mon, Wed 12:00-1:15pm. For more information, contact Prof. Joseph Nagy

Potential Concentrators, Joint Concentrators, and Secondaries

Click here for our Advising Page and our list of 2021 Concentration Advising Events

FM 172: Quilts and Quiltmaking

Spring Term 2025. Time TBA. For more information contact Dr. Felicity Lufkin, lufkin@fas.harvard.edu

GENED 1195: Folklore of Food

Spring term 2024. For more information contact Prof. Joseph Nagy

Summer Research

Devi Lockwood '14 bicycled the Mississippi River Trail, collecting folktales for her senior project.

Appalachia Betwixt and Between: A Folklore Symposium

April 19 (film screening of "King Coal", 6:30pm) and April 20, 2024 (all day symposium 9:00am-7:00pm) - See Events

Yemaya Afro-Cuban Orisha Dance

Anna Walters '06 performs at symposium "Legends of Landscape, Narratives of Nature"

Hero Pagination

Welcome!

The concentration in Folklore and Mythology is a liberal education in itself, and although most graduates of the program go on to successful careers in medicine, law, business, journalism, and other pursuits, an unusually large number of our alumni and alumnae teach and conduct research in a variety of academic departments.

This concentration focuses on the study of society, past or present, through its cultural documents and artifacts, and uses a variety of methodologies drawn from the humanities and social sciences. To concentrate on a society's folklore and mythology (at local, regional, national, or even trans-national levels) is to understand how that society defines itself through through its myths, legends, epics, ballads, folktales, beliefs and other cultural phenomena including music, food, dance, drama, dress, rituals, festival celebrations, and everyday expressive practices. To study the folklore and mythology of any group is to discover how that group identifies itself in relation to others.

Founded in 1967 and the oldest undergraduate degree program in the field in this country, Folklore and Mythology at Harvard has produced many distinguished graduates. Students often form mutually supportive groups; student-faculty contact is by tradition — and structure — very close; and collegiality within the program is highly valued. Concentrators conduct independent research on the material, oral, written, or performed forms of folklore and mythology in their areas of specialization, which range greatly across time and space. ()

My professional goals are to make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational, and seek to make the unconscious conscious.

Alan Dundes

Cultures are, after all, collective, untidy assemblages authentificated by belief and agreement, focused only in crisis, systemitized after the fact.

Barbara Myerhoff

Fieldwork involving other people is one of the most intensively personal kinds of scholarly research I know.

Bruce Jackson

Folklore is the boiled-down juice, or pot-likker, of human living

Zora Neale Hurston