Prominent Folklorist is 2007 Arrington Lecturer at USU

The 2007 Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture at Utah State University features noted folklorist William A. Wilson, a humanities professor emeritus in folklore and literature at Brigham Young University. The lecture, held each fall, is presented by Special Collections and Archives in the Merrill-Cazier Library at USU in conjunction with the Leonard J. Arrington Foundation.

Wilson’s lecture, “What’s True in Mormon Folklore? The Contribution of Folklore to Mormon Studies,” will be presented Sept. 27, 7 p.m., at the Logan LDS Tabernacle, 50 North Main. The lecture is free and open to all.

 

Wilson has ties to Utah State University, where he served as director of the folklore program and developed the annual Fife Folklore Conference. He also helped develop the Fife Folklore Archives and was instrumental in incorporating the archive into the Merrill Library’s holdings.

 

Wilson earned his doctorate in folklore from Indiana University. He began his teaching career as a high school English teacher in Bountiful, Utah, and has since taught at Indiana University, UCLA, USU, the University of Oregon and BYU. At BYU he served as chair of the English department, as director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and as director of the BYU Folklore Archives, now known as the William A. Wilson Folklore Archive. He is a fellow of the American Folklore Society and is the author of the prize-winning Folklore and Nationalism in Modern Finland, Folklore and Dixie: Past and Present and The Marrow of Human Experience: Essays on Folklore. He has twice won the Morris S. Rosenblatt Award for articles published in Utah Historical Quarterly.

 

USU’s Merrill-Cazier Library houses the personal and historical collection of the late Leonard J. Arrington, a renowned scholar of the American West. As part of that gift to the university, Arrington requested that the historical collection also become the focus for an annual lecture on an aspect of Mormon history. Honoring that request, the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series was established in 1995.

 

During a long and distinguished career, Arrington was a professor of economics at USU, church historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History. He was the author of numerous books and articles.

 

For information about the Arrington Lecture, contact Brad Cole at Utah State University, (435) 797-8268.

 

Contact: Brad Cole (435) 797-8268