JANE
YOUNG
Professor of American Studies and
Regents Lecturer for the College of Arts and Sciences
A folklorist whose research interests include material
culture and ethnoaesthetics, archeo- and ethnoastronomy, gender
studies, and landscape studies. Young has conducted extensive
fieldwork among the Zuni Indians of New Mexico and has become
a specialist on the rock art of the area. This work appears in
her Signs from the Ancestors: Zuni Cultural Symbolism and
Perceptions of Rock Art (1988).
More recently, she has been focusing on socio-cultural
changes in family and community relationships among the potters
of Mata Ortiz (northern New Mexico), and conducting research
on the Great American Duck Race of Deming, New Mexico, which
she regards as a “performance of identity” and a “celebration
of the ridiculous”.
She received a UNM Faculty Scholar Award for fall
1990 to begin research for a book on the contributions of women
scholars in the early days of the American Folklore Society.
She has also co-edited a collection of articles entitled Feminist
Theory and the Study of Folklore (1993); and is co-editor
(with A. Gabriel Melendez, Patricia Moore, and Patrick Pynes),
of The Multicultural Southwest: A Reader (2001).
She is currently active in various museums
and women studies associations, and is a member of the American
Anthropological Association, the American Association for State
and Local History, the American Folklore Society, the American
Studies Association, and the National Women’s Studies
Association. She teaches material culture and folk art, Southwest
Studies, fieldwork and research methodology, American folklore,
ethnic foodways, ritual and festival in the Southwest and gender
studies.
Publications
Signs from the Ancestors: Zuni Cultural Symbolism
and Perceptions of Rock Art (1988).
Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore (1993).
Co-Editor.
The Multicultural Southwest: A Reader (2001). co-editor
with A. Gabriel Melendez, Patricia Moore, and Patrick Pynes.
Courses
AMST 313/513, American Folklore and Folklife
|
