Sharon R. Sherman

Sharon R. Sherman (born April 16, 1943 in Toronto, Canada) is an American folklorist, producer of documentary films and videos, university professor, and author.

Life and career

Sharon Sherman was born in Toronto and her family moved when she was young to Detroit, Michigan. She attended Wayne State University in Detroit, where she studied with folklorist Ellen Stekert. Sherman wrote her senior thesis on Anglo-American ballad scholarship and graduated with her PhB in Latin and Science of Society in 1965.

Sherman taught public school from 1964 to 1968 in the Detroit area. She then devoted herself to graduate study in Folklore and Mythology at UCLA. At UCLA, she participated in its Ethnographic Film Program and studied with filmmaker Jorge Preloran. She produced her first 16mm film Tales of the Supernatural in 1970. She received the M.A. in 1971, and then pursued doctoral studies in folklore at Indiana University-Bloomington. She received the Ph.D. in Folklore in 1978 with the dissertation "The Folkloric Film: The Relevance of Film for Understanding Folkloric Events."

In 1976, she received an appointment as assistant professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. She was promoted to associate professor in 1981, professor in 1994, and upon retirement in 2008, became professor emerita. From 1985 to 2006, she served as director of the Folklore Program and the Randall V. Mills Archives of Northwest Folklore. She received the University's Rippey Teaching Innovation Award four times.

Sherman held a number of leadership positions in the Western States Folklore Society, American Folklore Society, and other professional organizations. She served as President of the Western States Folklore Society 2005-2007, President of the Oregon Folklore Society 1980-1981, Film and Videotape Review Editor for the Journal of American Folklore 1995-2001, and Film Review Editor for Western Folklore 1983-1989. In 2008, she was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

Films and Videos

Sherman drew international notice for her 16mm film Kathleen Ware, Quiltmaker in 1979. It was an award winner at the Northwest Film and Video Festival and was featured on a five-week tour of England with the AAmerican Institute for Foreign Study. In 1983, she began working with video with the release of Passover: A Celebration. Spirits in the Wood: The Chainsaw Art of Skip Armstrong. The videos that followed moved from the United States to Ecuador with Inti Raymi en Quinchuqui (2006) about an indigenous syncretic festival, and Whatever Happened to Zulay? (2012) about Zulay Sarabino, an indigenous Ecuadoran cultural leader.

Books

In 1995, Sherman published a book titled Chainsaw Sculptor: The ARt of J. Chester "Skip" Armstrong for the University Press of Mississippi about J. Chester Armstrong about whom she had produced a film. In articles and books following this work, she drew attention to film studies as a field of folkloristics. In Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture (1998) for the University Press of Kentucky, Sherman gave a history of documentary filmmaking and relates it to theories and techniques of folkloristic fieldwork. Together with Mikel Koven, in 2007, she edited Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture with contributors analyzing popular films for their folkloric content.

Sherman's papers are archived at the UUniversity of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives.

References

Sharon R. Sherman. "Screening American Studies: Intersections." EAS Forum 6.

"Filmmakers: Sharon R. Sherman." Folkstreams

"Sharon R. Sherman." Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 57 (2016).

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