About VOVA

Catharine Mason, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and Linguistic Ethnography at the University of Caen — Normandy in France. She is a member of the Laboratoire CRISCO for interlanguage research. Her work focuses on the stylistic features of oral discourse in a variety of languages including Clackamas Chinook, Southside Virginia English, and Anglo Pidgins and English dialects spoken in Normandy, France. She has published works on Chinook oral narratives, blues poetics, and video ethnography in language documentation. Her major focus is on stylistics as an essential structuring mechanism of speaking. Dr. Mason is the founding president of the Board of Directors of VOVA, Inc. and VOVA France, member of the VOVA Advisory Board, project coordinator for the VOVA start-up initiative in online language learning, and primary coordinator for international exchange in VOVA administration and research activities.

Sara Rose Johnson is a proud member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon. She has worked in the management of specialty commercial construction and is currently a broker at Windermere Bridgeport Realty Group. Having achieved a BA in Human Development and Family Services with an emphasis in early childhood education at Oregon State University, Ms. Johnson helped to build the summer program for Autistic Children Activity into a year-long endeavor. A coach for girl's soccer, Ms. Johnson is also a member of Mazamas, a mountaineering club in Portland, and plays on two indoor soccer teams. As Secretary of VOVA, Ms. Johnson wishes to apply her passion and drive for pushing limits towards making VOVA a sustaining initiative in preserving indigenous languages and cultures.

Thomas Belt, native speaker of Cherokee is Elder-in-Residence and language instructor in the Cherokee Studies Program at West Carolina University. A member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, he has resided in North Carolina for 14 years working with the Eastern Band Cherokees as Cherokee language program coordinator. Mr. Belt also serves as a consultant for other indigenous language programs. He is an accomplished public speaker in both English and Cherokee and has served his communities as a liaison between the living oral tradition and the ongoing revitalization program. His outstanding work in Cherokee revitalization with speakers at all levels of education, from primary school to adult education, has led to a joint venture with the University of North Carolina for Cherokee courses with Tom Belt through teleconference. In addition to his work in linguistics and the Cherokee language, he works as a counselor's aide in a local treatment center for native youths with chemical dependencies. Mr Belt is a member of the VOVA Board of Directors.

Tony A. Johnson is chairman of the Chinook Nation, published scholar of language and culture, artist, teacher, woodworker, and canoe-maker. Mr. Johnson was born in the traditional territory of his ancesters on Willapa Bay in the state of Washington where he currently lives with his family. He attended the University of Washington and Central Washington University and directed the Language Program for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde from its beginnings in 1997 until 2010. He is also a founding member and skipper of his canoe family. Having learned Chinuk Wawa from his elders, Johnson has written a number of articles about North West Coast Native cultures and co-authored with Dr. Henry Zenk a comprehensive dictionary of Chinuk Wawa. As a founding member of the VOVA Board of Directors, Mr. Johnson brings his commitment to the art, language, and lifeways of his Chinookan ancestors and community to the VOVA mission.

Clara Sue Kidwell, PhD is an independenet educator and researcher in Native American Studies and Ethnohistory. Her research interests focus on American Indian history, history of the Choctaw Indians, and American Indian religions. Dr. Kidwell began her teaching career at Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas in 1970, and she has taught in Native American Studies and American Indian Studies programs at the University of Minnesota, the University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and the University of Oklahoma. She co-authored Native American Studies, an introductory textbook, and American Indian Theology, an introductory textbook for seminary students. She is also author of From Tribe to Nation: The Choctaw Nation 1855-1970, and Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi. Having served on the faculty of pioneering American Indian Studies programs at Berkeley and other institutions, Dr. Kidwell later served on the original staff as assistant director for cultural resources at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. and as founding director of the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2007 to 2011. After leaving North Carolina she taught briefly at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma (her home town), and volunteered as director of a museum of Indian cultures there. Her career has been dedicated to promoting scholarship and greater understanding of American Indian history and cultures. A life long research advocate, Dr. Kidwell is a founding member of the VOVA Board of Directors bringing her valuable experience in innovating programs in research, education, and policy advocacy.

Gus Palmer, Jr., PhD, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oklahoma University. He is a native speaker of the Kiowa language and member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. His interest in story and performance led him to develop extensive fieldwork studies on Kiowa storytelling practices. Dr. Palmer has published works on the Kiowa language and cultures as well as Native American ethnology and linguistic anthropology including edited works of Kiowan oral narratives. Dr. Palmer’s focus on storytelling in everyday conversation provides insights into personal and cultural narratives as a way of informing and entertaining members of Kiowa speaking communities. His recent work, When Dream Bear Sings offers a compilation of Native Southern Plains oral traditions, including methodological and interpretive commentary. Dr. Palmer is a founding member of the VOVA Board of Directors, providing keen insight into the exigencies of editing stylized oral discourse as well as poetic inspiration.

Catharine Mason, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and Linguistic Ethnography at the University of Caen — Normandy in France. She is a member of the Laboratoire CRISCO for interlanguage research. Her work focuses on the stylistic features of oral discourse in a variety of languages including Clackamas Chinook, Southside Virginia English, and Anglo Pidgins and English dialects spoken in Normandy, France. She has published works on Chinook oral narratives, blues poetics, and video ethnography in language documentation. Her major focus is on stylistics as an essential structuring mechanism of speaking. Dr. Mason is the founding president of the Board of Directors of VOVA, Inc. and VOVA France, member of the VOVA Advisory Board, project coordinator for the VOVA start-up initiative in online language learning, and primary coordinator for international exchange in VOVA administration and research activities.

Astrid Vabret, MD, PhD is Head of the Laboratory of Virology at the University Hospital, and Professor of Virology, at the University of Caen, Normandy. Specialist of respiratory viruses and coranaviruses, Professor Vabret has published works in a wide range of viral studies including the treatment of chronic viral infections (hepatitis B and C, HIV). She is especially interested in the transmission of viruses across species barriers and conducts multidisciplinary research in both human and animal medicine. An active member of the ANRS (Agence Nationale de Recherche pour le SIDA-AIDS), Professor Vabret is also engaged in international collaborations with the Pasteur Institute of Shanghai, the RESPARI network of Asia-Pacific region, the Pasteur Institute of Dakar in Senegal, and the Gluck Equine Research Center at the University of Kentucky. Highly sensitive to the need for informing the general public about virology, she is the author of Man and Virus, a Sustainable Relationship. Professor Vabret is a founding member of the VOVA Board of Directors in France and holds that the study of oral tradition can serve to open up diverse means and media for diffusing scientific information about viral diseases to populations that do not have access to specialized written documentation.

Clotilde Lemarchant, PhD, HDR, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Lille. Dr. Lemarchant is a member of the CNRS affiliated Maurice Halbwachs Center in Paris. This center focuses on the development of tools and techniques for collecting data in fields studies for sociological purposes, borrowing methods from ethnography and economics. Dr. Lemarchant’s primary areas of study are gender related. She has carried out extensive studies of atypical choices and lifestyles relating to vocational and educational students among male and female students in France. She has been conducting field studies throughout her career, depending heavily upon accurate techniques of recording and transcribing speech, and has thus developed a critical ear as well as analytical methods for evaluation. She has become especially interested in methodological questions concerning the interpretation of oral discourse. Originally from the Manche, a rural region of France, Dr. Lemarchant is highly sensitive to the disappearance of cultures and ways of speaking. She was the founding secretary of VOVA in France.

Réjane Vimard is an accountant at KPMG in Normandy, France. Her interest in VOVA stems primarily from the value she places on diversity, verbal exchange, and openness to others in preparation for the future. She serves as treasurer for the Association VOVA in France.

Eric Jarno, MA, documentary film producer and founder of Pays des Miroirs Productions, is also instructor of film production at the University of Caen, Normandie. His personal work includes screenplays as well as the realization and production of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. As director of film production in the Cinema Arts department of UCBN, Mr. Jarno has assisted undergraduate students in bringing to the screen over 40 film productions. His pedagogical activities also include workshops and seminars in writing, directing, and interpreting films. His interest in filming vocal and verbal art performance lead him to participate in the founding of VOVA in France.

Pierre Diarra, PhD is a native speaker of Boomu and Bambara from Mali. He is an Instructor of Religious Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III and the Catholic Institute of Paris. He teaches courses in African Religions, Epistemology, and Research Methodologies. Dr Diarra is a member of the Research Center “Pragmatic Approaches to the Philosophy of Language and Communication” at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris where he focuses his research on new tendencies in rituals. Among his editorial work, Dr. Diarra is coordinating editor of the African and Amerindian articles for Rites, fêtes et célébrations de l’humanité (“Rituals, Festivals and Celebrations of Humanity”) and serves as chief editor of the Revue Mission en Eglise aux Oeuvres pontificales Missionaire (“Mission Church Review of Pontifical Works of the Missionary”). He has contributed numerous articles on African oral traditions, philosophical and theological beliefs and practices in Mali, and African approaches to humanity. Dr. Diarra is on the Board of Directors of VOVA, France.

Christiane Rakotomalala, PhD, is a Research and Development Engineer in ecological sciences with a doctorate in Marine Biology. Expert in modelization, data analysis, and multidisciplinary project management, she has been contributed to the development of decision-support tools for sustainable natural resources management in Normandy. She is an advocate of wildlife conservation and understands the dynamic relations between biodiversity and linguistic divesity. Committed to the vital practice and safekeeping of Malagasy, her native language, and its literary heritage, Dr. Rakotomalala is a Board member at VOVA, France.

Catharine Mason, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and Linguistic Ethnography at the University of Caen — Normandy in France. She is a member of the Laboratoire CRISCO for interlanguage research. Her work focuses on the stylistic features of oral discourse in a variety of languages including Clackamas Chinook, Southside Virginia English, and Anglo Pidgins and English dialects spoken in Normandy, France. She has published works on Chinook oral narratives, blues poetics, and video ethnography in language documentation. Her major focus is on stylistics as an essential structuring mechanism of speaking. Dr. Mason is the founding president of the Board of Directors of VOVA, Inc. and VOVA France, member of the VOVA Advisory Board, project coordinator for the VOVA start-up initiative in online language learning, and primary coordinator for international exchange in VOVA administration and research activities.

Raymond J. DeMallie, PhD is Chancellors’ Professor of Anthropology and Director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University. He has done extensive linguistic fieldwork among the Sioux and Assiniboine peoples, collecting traditional myths, tales, and histories from speakers of those languages. In addition to his fieldwork on reservations in the Dakotas, Montana, and Saskatchewan, Professor DeMallie has carried out elaborate archival, library, and museum studies to discover, edit, and publish major sources on the Sioux and Assiniboine past. He has published and edited works on Sioux culture, religion and history, on ethnohistorical methods, on ethnographical histories, and on American Indian corpus study. Professor DeMallie’s work provides mutiple perspectives and methods for studying and understanding Native American life and history. He is a member of the VOVA Advisory Board.

Paul V. Kroskrity is a Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he has served as the Chair of the Interdepartmental Program in American Indian Studies since 1985. He received his B.A. from Columbia College, Columbia University and earned his Ph.D, in Anthropology from Indiana University in 1977. His involvement with Native American communities began with his dissertation research in 1973 on the Arizona Tewa which became more than two decades of research involvement on Arizona Tewa grammar, sociolinguistics, verbal art, and language ideology. This research resulted in numerous articles and books on these topics including Language, History and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa and the edited collection, Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities . In addition, he has also worked with members of the Western Mono communities of North Fork and Auberry in Central California. This research has focused on lexicography, language contact, verbal art, and language revitalization and has continued since 1980 when the UCLA-Mono Language Project began. In addition to numerous articles, this community based research has produced A Practical Dictionary of Western Mono and Taitaduhaan: Western Mono Ways of Speaking (CD-ROM). His current research projects are concerned with dictionary making, and producing edited collections of representative verbal art for both of these communities. He also continues to be deeply concerned with language ideologies and language renewal efforts. Professor Kroskrity is a member of the VOVA Advisory Board.

Nicole Revel, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at Paris Descartes University, is also a Emeritus research director at the Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS) and co-founder of the former CNRS-Paris V René Descartes “Languages, Musics, Societies (LMS)”. Based on her fieldwork of fifty-five years in the Philippines, Professor Revel has published widely on the Palawan language, oral traditions, and music. Professor Revel coordinated the UNESCO international seminar on “Epics”, in the “Integral Study of Silk Roads, Roads of Dialogue” and developed a preservation program of this Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Philippines. She ultimately extended her analysis to the Hudhud of the Ifugao in northern Luzon, the kata-kata of the Sama and Sama dilaut in Tawi-Tawi, and the ulaging of the Talaandig Bukidnon in Mindanao.

Cécile Leguy is Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She is a member of the CNRS research group “LACITO”. With an essentially ethnolinguistic approach, Professor Leguy has done fieldwork in Mali and Burkina Faso focusing on genres of oral discourse—proverbs, riddles, and tales—and naming processes among Bwa speakers. Her editorial positions include Co-Editor in Chief of Cahiers de Littérature Orale; member of the Editorial board of CARGO Revue Internationale d’Anthropologie Culturelle & Sociale and member of the Editorial Committee of the "Classiques africains" collection (edited by Karthala). Professor Leguy is co-author of Anthropologie des pratiques langagières and co-editor of Comp eacute;tence et performance: perspectives interdisciplinaires sur une dichotomie classique among numerous special collections of reviews. Professor Leguy serves on the Advisory Board for VOVA France and VOVA, Inc.

Ofelia Zepeda, PhD is Regents’ Professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and co-founder of the nationally recognized American Indian Language Development Institute at the University of Arizona. She has been director of the Institute since 1989. She is a Native speaker and preservationist of the Tohono O'odham language. Professor Zepeda has published numerous works on the Tohono O'odham language based on her own fieldwork. In addition to her work on the Tohono O'odham language, Professor Zepeda has published and edited works on American Indian language issues, dialect variation, language preservation, and Native American literature. She has won awards for her community outreach projects and for her service to graduate students. Poet in both Tohono O'odham and English, her poems have been published in two books and in anthologies. Professor Zepeda is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Lise Dobrin is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Virginia. She has done fieldwork in the Arapesh languages of Papua New Guinea. With support from the National Endowment of the Humanities program, Documenting Endangered Languages, Dr. Dobrin is building a digital archive of Arapesh linguistic materials. Among her many publications, we find works on Arapesh grammar, language endangerment, and the history of ethnography. Dr. Dobrin is a strong advocate of ethics policy in field practices and is a founding member of InField, promoting efficient field methods as an integral part of linguistic studies. In addition to her research and coursework in grammar, morphology and phonology, Dr. Dobrin has brought light to stylistic features of oral Arapesh discourse. Dr. Dobrin is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Alexander King, PhD, is Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His fieldwork in Koryak, an indigenous language of the Russian Federation has led him to an interest in the many variants of this language in Kamchatka. His ethnographic and ethnopoetic approaches to culture and tradition have led him to focus on how Koryak speakers perceive their own use of language. Having looked at stylistic features in a wide variety of languages, a focus motivated by his studies with Virginia and Dell Hymes, Dr. King organized a special session to study the analytical works of Virginia Hymes at the 2009 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association. Dr. King is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Obododimma Oha, PhD, is a Professor of Cultural Semiotics and Stylistics in the Department of English at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and editor of CONTEXT: Journal of Social and Cultural Studies. His research has focused on verbalisations of identity in indigenous traditions, literature, and the New Media. Professor Oha is particularly interested in cultural significations that relate to conflict in the African world. He has also conducted research on narratives that focus on Igbo transborder movements, the shifting semiotics of home, and emerging identity conflicts associated with return to the homeland. He has participated in a number of projects on translations of literature. Professor Oha is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Douglas Parks, PhD, is Professor of Linguistics, founding researcher of the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University, and editor of the journal Anthropological Linguistics. Dr. Parks' wide-reaching and elaborate field research has focused on the Pawnee and Arikara languages of North America. The results of his research have been published in dictionaries, collections of native language texts and literary translations of those texts, and grammars for use in various contexts. Leading scholar of Native American philology, Professor Parks has provided elaborate demonstrations of applying linguistics to historical documentation of American Indian languages and cultures, combining committed field study with rigorous corpus study. Professor Parks has also worked with programs that seek to revitalize the endangered languages that he has studied. Professor Parks is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Rémi Pézeril has been a community based revitalizationist of the Norman language in France for 30 years. He has curated exhibits on the history and literature of the Norman language, participated in radio chronicles in Norman, and published grammatical and literary works on the Norman language. He has also helped to revitalize Norman games at local festivities. Pézeril is current president of the non-profit corporation, Magène, that he helped to found in 1989. Magène has released twelve CDs, issuing 500 to 2,500 copies of each. Pézeril is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Michael Uzendoski, PhD is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. Dr. Uzendoski specializes in cultural anthropology, symbolic anthropology, ethnopoetics, storytelling/folklore, and ritual. His work is situated in Ecuador and focuses on Amazonian Kichwa (Quichua) language and culture. He is interested in multimodal forms of expression and the way storytellers use the landscape, the body, as well as the voice in creating complex meanings in storytelling and music. His forthcoming book [with Edith Calapucha Tapuy] is titled, The Ecology of the Spoken Word: Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo Runa (Illinois). He is also author of Los Napo Runa de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana (Quito: Abya-Yala 2010), The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador (Illinois 2005), and several journal articles published in English and Spanish. His work has been supported by both Fulbright and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Uzendoski is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Sylvain Vogel, PhD, HDR is an independent researcher who has taught languages, literature, and linguistics at a number of institutions including the University of Qaid-e-Azam, Kabul University, and the Royal University of Phnom Pehn. He is a member of the Laboratory of Formal Linguistics at the University of Paris-Diderot. Multilingual from childhood, Dr. Vogel is a scholar of French, Sanskrit, Persian, Pashto, Phnong, and Khmer. His primary field studies have been carried out in Afghanistan and Cambodia. With the support of UNICEF, he published his work on Phnong grammar that includes a study of poetic form. He continues to study the stylistic structures of Phnong oral tradition while striving to protect Phnong speaking communities from the demands and pressures of the global economy.

Frank Alvarez-Pereyre, PhD, is Professor of linguistics and ethnology, and director of research of the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research). Founding director of the CNRS research team, "Languages, Musics, Societies", Professor Alvarez-Pereyre is a specialist of anthropological linguistics. He has done fieldwork in Romanian, French, and Jewish oral traditions. Professor Alvarez-Pereyre has also done pioneer work in interdisciplinary methodologies, combining critical tools in linguistics, anthropology and ethnomusicology, and innovating the study of categories as a culturally-specific epistemological process as well as a scientific tool. He has published works that focus on genres of oral discourse, ethnographic methodologies, and theoretical and epistemological matters in the study of language and culture. Professor Alvarez-Pereyre is a member of the VOVA Editorial Board and principle research coordinator between VOVA and the LMS.

John Leavitt is Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at Université de Montréal, Canada. He holds a Diplôme du 2e Cycle from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Professor Leavitt has conducted field research on oral poetry and divine possession in the Central Himalayan region of northern India, on oral performance among Indian immigrants in Canada, and on language and poetry in Ireland. He has published on the relationship between poetry and states of consciousness (editor, Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration, 1997); on Indo-European comparative mythology (co-editor and editor of special issues of journals, The New Comparative Mythology, 1998, and Le mythe aujourd'hui, 2005), and on the relationships between language, culture, and thought (Linguistic Relativities, 2011). Professor Leavitt serves on the Editorial Committee of VOVA.

Steve Coleman, PhD is a Lecturer of Linguistic Anthropology at Maynooth University. His research focuses on semiotic and linguistic anthropology, on the history, culture, and politics of the Irish Gaeltacht (“Irish-speaking districts”), and on Irish linguistic and performance culture more generally. Steve serves on the VOVA Editorial Board.

Anthony K. Webster is a linguistic anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He also has affiliations with the Native American and Indiegenous Studies Program and the Department of Linguistics. Since 1997, his work focuses on primarily on verbal artistry, especially among Navajos. He is the author of Explorations of Navajo Poetry (2009), Intimate Grammars: An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry (2015), and The Sounds of navajo Poetry: A Humanities of Speaking (2018). With Paul V. Kroskrity, he is co-editor of The Legacy of Dell Hymes: Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice (2015) and with Esther G. Gelin, Jeff Berglund, and Connie Jacobs, he is co-editor if The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature (2021).

Susan Hawkins, collector of folklore and material folk culture, is an events organizer. Her work in the organizing of private and public events has stimulated her interest in language, social life, and entertainment. She is especially interested in the American frontier, early 20th century American history, and contemporary pop culture. Her keen attention to detail and concern for the human condition, especially that of the elderly, motivated her to participate in the founding of the non-profit corporation, VOVA, Inc. Ms. Hawkins is a founding member of the VOVA Board of Directors.

Aurélie Le Cordier obtained a Masters degree in Environment and Societies from the University of Caen, Lower Normandy. She has conducted fieldwork and research on the correlations between space and identity in France, China, and the USA. Her work focuses on diversity of societies as seen through the way that each society expresses its culture and builds its cities. Ms Le Cordier has also applied anthropological and ethnographic approaches in her interpretations of images, symbols, and language use. She examines photography, documentary film, poetry, and song in her research and in her course teachings. She currently lives in the USA where she has been teaching social studies for three years. Committed to cultural diversity, she believes that education is fundamental to preserving and respecting the landscapes, languages and cultures. Ms Le Cordier is the Audiovisual Archives Coordinator for VOVA as well as the VOVA webmaster.

John Foley was a leading international specialist of comparative oral tradition. He set standards for methodological applications and international exchange in areas of collecting and publishing oral traditions. Before his recent death, he was Curators' Professor and William H. Byler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Missouri‚ Columbia. In 1985, Dr. Foley founded the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition as well as the Center for International Review, and Oral Tradition. His editorial accomplishments also include three series of books: Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, Voices in Performance and Text, and Poetics of Orality and Literacy. Dr. Foley's personal research work focused on ancient Greek, early medieval English, and South Slavic, the results of which may be found in major works including The Theory of Oral Composition, Traditional Oral Epic, The Singer of Tales in Performance, and How to Read an Oral Poem. Through innovation in field and corpus study as well as a commitment to complimentary methodologies, Dr. Foley has made major advances in our understanding and appreciation of the world's oral traditions. He was a member of the VOVA editorial board.

Emerita, University of Virginia, prominent field scholar of the Sahaptin language, has provided elaborate demonstrations of verse form in oral narratives of a variety of language traditions. She collaborated with her husband, Dell Hymes, in the discovery and development of verse analysis, lending her own unique blend of phonological and rhetorical study as she has worked throughout the years from tape-recordings. In addition to the rich results of her own empirical analyses of formal structure in the body of work that she has collected, Mrs. Hymes has been a leading instructor of this particular methodology. A number of her students and associates continue to pay tribute to her for her diligent guidance to working out the architectural designs of orally composed texts. Mrs. Hymes was a member of the VOVA editorial board.

Saad Sowayan, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at King Saud University. He has published articles in Arabic and English on the oral literature and spoken language of the Arabian nomads. His ongoing fieldwork in Saudi Arabia reaches into the oldest and most longstanding traditions of preliterate Arabic. His major works in English are Nabati Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia (1985) and The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative: An Ethnographic and Linguistic Analysis (1992). Dr Sowayan's publications offer remarkable ethnographic standards of concrete evidence in oral Arabian genres, stylistic features and formal organization. Professor Sowayan was a member of the VOVA Editorial Board.

Walt Wolfram, PhD is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English Linguistics at North Carolina State University and director of the North Carolina Language and Life Project. His outstanding work in ethnic dialects and cultural diversity reflects a keen understanding of how language functions in social life. Professor Wolfram has published many works and produced documentaries on American English, African American Englishes, community and school dialects, regional dialects in North Carolina, and language variety in linguistic research. Throughout his works, we find a vital concern with the application of sociolinguistic information to social and educational problems and the dissemination of knowledge about dialects to the public. Professor Wolfram was a member of the VOVA Board of Directors.

Isidore Okpewho, PhD is State University of New York Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. Originally from Nigeria, Professor Okpewho is an internationally renowned scholar of West African oral traditions and specialist of African and comparative literature. His outstanding collections and descriptions of genres, traditional narratives, and oral transmission, along with the special attention he pays to the individual voices and styles of raconteurs, have established ethnographical and literary standards in the study of oral tradition. Author of four novels, Professor Okpewho is a member of the VOVA Advisory Board.