Charting the Folklore of Ireland

Introduction

With the foundation of The Folklore of Ireland Society (An Cumann le Béaloideas Éireann) in 1927, the idea of the scientific collection, preservation, indexing and publication of the folklore of Ireland, in all its richness, variety and imaginative intensity, gained momentum. 

The move also led, less than a decade later, to the setting up of institutions which, over the years, were to develop the aims of The Folklore of Ireland Society to a remarkable extent, and to lead, in the 1970s, to the establishment of the thriving academic discipline, Irish Folklore, in University College Dublin.
 

Folklore of Ireland

Professor Patricia Lysaght is the author of the following article, Folklore of Ireland.



A native of Co. Clare, Patricia Lysaght is a Professor in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore, and Linguistics, University College Dublin. She is currently Head of Subject, Irish Folklore. Professor Lysaght’s academic background is in Law (Barrister-at-Law), the Classics, Irish Language and Literature, and Irish and European Folklore and Ethnology. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Scholar at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany, in 1987-8, Acting Professor of Folklore at Georg-August Universität, Göttingen, Germany, in 1996-7, and Guest Professor at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, in 1998-9. She was visiting scholar at the Institute of Ethnology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, in 1993.

Professor Lysaght has published ten books (2 as sole author, 7 as contributory editor and 1 as coeditor), and more than one hundred research articles both as chapters in books and as research papers in a wide range of international refereed journals. Her book, The Banshee (1986), has become a standard work, and new (1996) and American (1997) editions have appeared. The pocket version of the book (A Pocket Book of The Banshee, 1998) has been translated into Russian and is currently being translated into Japanese. Professor Lysaght is Editor in chief of two international peer-reviewed journals: Folklore, Journal of The Folklore Society, London, and Béaloideas, The Journal of The Folklore of Ireland Society, Dublin. She is also an elected member of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture, Uppsala, Sweden, and of The Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.


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