Dr. Carolyn Ware

Assistant Professor

English

260 Allen Hall

Tel: (225)578-4867

E-Mail: cware1@lsu.edu

Carolyn Ware

  Background:

Folklorist Carolyn Ware joined LSU’s English Department as an assistant professor in 2001, and teaches folklore courses. She received her doctorate in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. Before coming to LSU, she worked as a public folklorist in Louisiana and Mississippi for thirteen years. She served as Pine Hills Culture Program Director at the University of Southern Mississippi from 1996 to 2001, and as Program Director for the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane from 1994 to 1996. She is co-author of Cajun Mardi Gras Masks (University Press of Mississippi) and numerous articles on women’s festive roles in Cajun culture, Croatians in Louisiana, folklife festivals, and other aspects of Southern folklore. She remains active in public folklore programs and is a member of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Folk Advisory Board and the Louisiana Folklife Festival Advisory Board.

  Education:

• 1994 Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania (Folklore and Folklife)
• 1976 B.A. Cornell University (Psychology)

  Research Interests:

Gender roles and role reversal, Louisiana folklore, Cajun Mardi Gras, folk healing traditions, festivals.

  Selected Publications:

• Lindahl, Carl and Carolyn Ware. Cajun Mardi Gras Masks. 1997. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Folk Arts Series.

• "Making a Show for the People: Cajun Mardi Gras as Public Display." 2003.
• In Signifying Serpents & Mardi Gras Runners: Representing Identity in Selected Souths, ed. Celeste Ray and Luke Eric Lassiter. Southern Anthropological Proceedings, No. 36. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press.
• "Anything to Act Crazy: Cajun Women and Mardi Gras Disguise." Journal of American Folklore 114. 445 (2001):225-247.
• "‘I Read the Rules Backward’: Women, Symbolic Inversion, and the Rural Cajun Mardi Gras." Southern Folklore 52.2 (1995):137-160.
• Editor and contributor, Isleño Home Remedies. Delacroix, Louisiana: Los Isleños Cultural and Heritage Society, 1999.
• Guest Editor, 96-page Piney Woods special issue of Mississippi Folklife 30.1 and 2 (1998).
• "Passing It On: Piney Woods Folklife," a sixteen-part documentary series broadcast statewide on Public Radio in Mississippi, September-November 2000.
• 42 short essays on Louisiana folk crafts for on-line Creole state exhibit, Louisiana Folklife Program, Louisiana Divisions of the Arts, August 2002.
• Book review, Mardi Gras Treasures: Invitations of the Golden Age, for Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. September 2001.
• "The Piney Woods Regional Folklife Project." Tributaries: The Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association 3 (1999): 40-58.
• "Folk Crafts, Community, and the Mississippi Craftsmen's Guild." In The Guild at Twenty-Five: A Portrait of the Craftsmen's Guild of Mississippi, ed. Stephen Flinn Young and Diana C. Young, pp. 43-54. Jackson: Craftsmen's Guild of Mississippi. 1998.
• "Croatians in Southeast Louisiana: An Overview." Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 11 (1996):67-85.
• "The Louisiana Folklife Festival." Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 6.44 (1991):25-29.
• "Ritual Spaces." Festival program book, Eunice, Louisiana: Louisiana Folklife Festival, 1992. (Reprinted for use in public school curriculum).

  Selected Courses Taught:

• Women and Folklore (ENG 4493).
• Introductory Folklore Graduate Seminar (ENG 7420).
• American Folklore (ANG/ANTH 4475).
• Study of Folklore (ENG/ANTH 3401).
• Introduction to Folklore (ENG/ANT 2423).