We are deeply saddened to share the news that Professor Emeritus Hasan M. El-Shamy passed away on August 16, 2026. We will pass on a full obituary and any details regarding a service in honor of Dr. El-Shamy once they are shared with us.
Our thoughts are with Susan, Jenny, Lyla, and the entire family during this difficult time.
Faculty member Dr. Jason Jackson, with the encouragement of Dr. El-Shamy’s family, has updated his 2013 scholarly biography to serve as a scholarly memorial.
Hasan M. El-Shamy (1938-2026)
Remembered by Jason Baird Jackson
Folklorist Hasan M. El-Shamy was affiliated with Indiana University (IU) beginning in 1960 when he began his graduate studies on the Bloomington campus. At the time of his passing on August 16, 2026 he was Professor Emeritus of Folklore. He thus was an IU student, alumni, or faculty member for a remarkable 66 years.
Hasan completed his doctorate in 1967. After a period of teaching sociology and anthropology at Morehead State University and directing the folklore archives in Cairo, he returned to Bloomington in 1972 and began moving through the professorial ranks. He became Professor Emeritus in 2013, after 41 years of distinguished teaching, research, and service in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he was also affiliated with the African Studies Program and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (now Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures).
Born June 21, 1938) and schooled in Cairo, Hasan attended Ain Shams University, completing his B.A. in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1959. A further year of graduate work in psychology and education initiated Hasan’s transition to the social sciences. A Fulbright Fellowship then enabled him to begin graduate studies in folklore at IU. Integrating psychology, anthropology, and folkloristics, his dissertation rethought folklore vis-à-vis social learning theory and considered the experiences of Egyptian immigrants in New York. The study brought psychological perspectives to bear on central questions in folkloristics and inaugurated a career-long effort to bridge these fields.
Regrettably, folklorists regularly conflate psychoanalytic perspectives with psychological ones. While cognizant of psychoanalytic contributions, Hasan labored to broaden the range of psychological perspectives gathered into the folklorist’s toolkit. Drawing upon scholarship on individual and social learning and on cognitive systems, he sought, in his research, to understand folklore as learned behavior. While captivated by the expressive materials of folklore, Hasan held that folklorists are obligated to develop robust theories of psychological and sociocultural processes suitable to account for folklore as complex human activity.
With nuanced frameworks in place and unique materials to study, folklorists—Hasan argued—have an important role to play within the broader human sciences. In bringing a folklorist’s interests to big questions, Hasan combined literary, ethnographic, historical, and comparative methodologies. His mastery of the field’s comparative tools was virtually unrivaled. His research on kinship vis-à-vis folk culture, cultural psychology, and mental health illustrates his integrative “folkloric behavior” approach. His studies of the “brother-sister syndrome” in the Middle East, and of sibling relations generally, showed how ethnological research sensitive to psychological issues and folkloristic data could challenge hidden biases in Western psychiatry while explicating key themes and tensions in particular cultures (ex. El-Shamy 2013).
Retirement provided Hasan with time to complete works long under way, but the fruits of his labors were already astounding when he joined the emeriti faculty community. Hasan’s oeuvre articulates a unified undertaking of lifelong scope. That project involved deep understanding of Middle Eastern and African cultures as an end in itself and as a means to advance comparative folkloristics, while helping folklore studies retain awareness of its own historical accomplishments and its need for theoretical refinement.
While his dissertation (1967) charted his psychological concerns, his Chicago Folklore Prize-winning volume The Folktales of Egypt confirmed his preeminence as a student of Middle Eastern folklore (1980, also 2018). Based on extensive fieldwork, it broke new ground, situating Egyptian materials in historical, African, Middle Eastern, and world contexts and explicating broad trends in Egyptian life.
One key contribution is Hasan’s demonstration of how folk cultures express basic ideas about humanity that have been codified as theory in the social sciences. Simultaneously an attack on ethnocentrism and an acknowledgment of the collective wisdom of humanity, this recognition brings folklore materials into direct dialogue with social theory and provides a means to categorize and assess folklore materials themselves. These themes underpin his Folk Traditions of the Arab World, which extends earlier historic-geographic frameworks, showing how folkloristics can adopt cognitive psychological and other theoretical perspectives for comparative narrative analysis (1995).
Hasan’s Tales Arab Women Tell and the Behavioral Patterns They Portray (1999) interprets a rich body of women’s narrative. This work articulates with his monumental Types of the Folktale in the Arab World (2004). Here Hasan again refashioned inherited perspectives, characterizing all of Arab folk narrative while showing how typological tools—so often seen as stripping social context away from tales destined for comparative study—can be improved to take account of key factors such as narrator literacy, gender, and educational background. A classic of world literature built around the theme of Middle Eastern storytelling, The Thousand and One Nights was an inevitable topic for Hasan’s careful consideration. His study of folk narrative elements woven into this masterpiece resulted in the landmark volume A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights (2006).
Among his later works is the ethnographic study Religion Among the Folk in Egypt (2008). Published in 2008 on the eve of monumental social and political change in his homeland, this study carefully examines the entire vernacular belief system characteristic of modern Egyptian Arabs. Thus, it offers perspectives that, if considered, would address the confusions of policy makers and elites seeking to understand the events unfolding daily on the streets of Egyptian cities in the current era.
The many honors bestowed upon Hasan include his election to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, two Fulbright Fellowships, and being named the 94th Great China Lecturer in 2011. An heir to the cosmopolitan tradition established at IU by Stith Thompson, Hasan has traveled the world introducing folkloristics to eager audiences. He was a remarkable ambassador for the field and the university. During the 2026-2027 academic year, the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology is celebrating a centennial marking 100 years since the bestowal of the first graduate degree in folklore studies in Bloomington. Hasan’s current colleagues lament that he will not be present for these celebrations, but they acknowledge his significant contributions to the history and legacy being marked.
While recognized internationally for his scholarship, Hasan was known around Bloomington as a loving husband to Susan, a proud father of Jenny and Lyla, and a doting grandfather to Nadia and Ben.
Folklorists in Bloomington and around the world will remember and celebrate Hasan for his many enduring contributions to scholarship and to the building up of international folkloristics.
The College of Arts