New York Folklore Society Staff

[We] have a stake in culture and its future, in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences, and in world understanding; if we don’t make ourselves heard and felt in the councils of cultural strategy, then we (and mankind) will be losers.

Benjamin Botkin, New York Folklore Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1952)

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

About the New York Folklore Society

STAFF MEMBERS

Ellen McHale, Executive Director

Ellen holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. A native New Yorker, she has worked for the last seventeen years as a consulting folklorist in many areas of upstate New York and western Massachusetts. Before taking the position as executive director of New York Folklore Society, Ellen held posts as director of the Schoharie County Historical Society/Old Stone Fort Museum (1990-1994), director of the Shaker Heritage Society (1986-1987), and assistant director of the Folklife Center of the International House of Philadelphia (1983-1985). A Fulbright Scholar, she received a Senior Fellowship to lecture at the Institute for Folklife Studies (Institutet for folklivsforskning) at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, from 1988-1989 and has taught folklore courses at the university level for Empire State College and for Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York. She has published numerous scholarly articles and programmatic pieces about her folklore scholarship.

Ellen McHale is no stranger to the New York Folklore Society, having served on the Board of NYFS from 1987 to 1997, with a term as president from 1993-1996. Actively involved with the Society’s archives project from its inception, she was a major contributor to the New York Folklore Society’s publication, Working with Folk Materials in New York State.

Read interview with NYFS Director Ellen McHale: “Q&A: Head of Folklore Society is a champion of oral histories” By Bill Buell, Daily Gazette, Schenectady, February 10, 2008

Felicia Faye McMahon, Acquisitions Editor of Voices

Felicia Faye McMahon is PARC Research Associate at Syracuse University. She earned her Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her published research includes folklore in the Adirondacks, the Upper Catskills, and Central New York. Faye co-edited Children’s Folklore: A Sourcebook with Brian Sutton-Smith et al. [hardcover 1995 Garland; paperback 1999 Utah State University Press] which was awarded the 1996 AFS Opie Prize for Best Edited Book. She is also primary Editor for Volume 6 of the academic journal of the Association for the Study of Play. Faye and husband John, who is Associate Professor of Classics at LeMoyne College, live in a woodstove-heated loghouse near Tully, NY at the end of a secondary road where the snowplows don’t plow.

Sally Atwater, Senior Editor of Voices

Sally is a publications specialist whose professional experience includes the acquisition and development of trade and scholarly books, and the management and editing of journals and magazines. In January 2000 she started her own editorial consulting firm, Editorial Arts. Sally lives in the Hamlet of Owasco in the Finger Lakes.

Patti Mason, Website Manager

Patti joined the New York Folklore Society in 1997, working as an administrative assistant in the Ithaca office through May, 1999. She has served as the Society’s website manager since its inception in 1998. With sadness, she left Ithaca, New York to accompany her family to Arizona in 2002, but happily continues her relationship with the Folklore Society through the joys of cyberspace.