This year, Indiana University marks one-hundred years of graduate training in folklore studies. In 1926, six graduate students completed their MA theses under the supervision of renowned IU Distinguished Professor of English and Folklore, Stith Thompson (1885-1976). Their topics included Indiana ballads, African folktales, French Canadians tales and Native American myths. Thompson’s expanded English translation of Antti Aarne’s The Types of the Folktale, first published in 1928, and his momentous Motif-Index of Folk Literature, first published in six volumes in the 1930s and revised by Thompson in the 1950s, continue to be used by folklorists around the world.
Folk 100 Initiative
Events Celebrating Folk 100
Spring 2026
February 26: Dorothy Noyes Distinguished Alumni Scholar Award Lecture: The Human Scale - Admonitions from Opera and Folktale
February 27: Departmental Reception for Dorothy Noyes, Distinguished Alumni Scholar
March 20-21: Epic Geography Symposium
March 27: Mark Bender, Richard M. Dorson Memorial Lecture
April 29: 20th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium
Fall 2026
Traditional Arts Indiana Heritage Fellowship Awards
October 27-31: American Folklore Society annual meeting in Asheville, NC
November 5-8: Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in Bloomington, IN
Herman B Wells Tribute to Stith Thompson
Herman B Wells, Indiana University Bloomington’s eleventh president and its first chancellor, shared a tribute to Stith Thompson in the 1996 publication Stith Thompson A Folklorist's Progress: Reflections of a Scholar's Life.



Fellows of the Folklore Society, Folkore Institute of American 1958, Stith Thompson
The College of Arts