Assistant Curator
The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature,
Harvard University
Ilex Foundation provides major support for the Milman
Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University. This
research collection consists of texts and recordings of oral literature,
including both epic and lyric songs, stories, and conversations with
singers and others, made in Yugoslavia by Milman Parry and his assistants
from 1933 to 1935, as well as additional collections of similar materials
from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania made by Albert B. Lord and others
between 1937 and 1967.
In addition, the Parry Collection houses the James A. Notopoulos Collection
of Modern Greek Songs from Greece, Cyprus and the Pontus, The Mario
Rinvolucri Collection of Modern Greek Shadow Plays; The Cedric Whitman
Collection of Modern Greek Shadow Plays, and several other collections
of folkloric and ethnomusicological materials.
The daily operation of the Milman Parry Collection is supported by
Ilex Foundation by providing a Fellowship to the Assistant Curator of
the Collection. Holders of the position have included Dr. Matthew Kay
(1998 - 2000) and David Elmer (2000 - ). The Assistant Curator is responsible
for the maintenance of the Collection and handles all requests for access
to the materials.
Additional projects undertaken by past and present Assistant Curators
include the cataloguing and indexing of significant portions of the
Collection. Ilex Foundation takes special interest in the development
of the Parry Collection's electronic resources, and made possible the
production of a CD-ROM included with the recent 2nd edition of Albert
Lord's Singer of Tales (Cambridge, 2000) containing transcriptions
and audio recordings of all the oral epics quoted in Lord's text. This
CD has proved to be a valuable resource to teachers and researchers
of oral traditions, and has laid the groundwork for more extensive projects.
The Parry Collection is building on this foundation with a significant
on-line presentation of its holdings through a digitization grant from
Harvard University, a project where Ilex plays an important supporting
role. Ilex Foundation also provides funding for the series, The Milman
Parry Studies in Oral Tradition, which will soon publish, for example,
a study of some of the 10,000 Serbo-Croatian women's songs in the Parry
Collection, and will re-issue important out-of-print texts.
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