Linda Dégh

Linda Dégh (born March 18, 1920 in Budapest , Hungary , † August 19, 2014 in Bloomington , Indiana , United States ) was a Hungarian folklorist who lived and taught in the United States.

Life

Dégh first studied folklore , English and Hungarian philology in Budapest and received his doctorate there in 1942 on the folk tale of the Hungarian storyteller Pandur . Between 1946 and 1951 she worked in various libraries in the city and at the Research Institute for Folk Studies (folklore). From 1951 she taught as a senior assistant , from 1958 as a lecturer at the chair for folklore at the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest, after having done a thesis on Hungarian fairy tales in 1955qualified as a professor . In 1964 she became visiting professor, shortly thereafter associate professor and four years later finally full professor at the Folklore Institute of Indiana University in Bloomington (Indiana) . Since 1982 she was Distinguished Professor Emerita there .

She was President of the Hoosier Folklore Society from 1966 to 1969 , Vice President from 1971 to 1973 and 1976, and President of the American Folklore Society from 1981 to 1983 , and Vice President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research from 1989 to 1999 .

Prizes and awards

• 1968 American Philosophy Fellowship
• 1971 Guggenheim scholarship
• 1984–1985 Fulbright scholarship in Germany
• 1989 Centennial Recognition Award from the American Folklore Society
• 1990–1991 National Humanities Center Fellowship
• 1991 Hoosier Folklore Society Achievement Award
• 1993 Outstanding Contribution Award from the International Society for the Study of Contemporary Legend
• 1995 Pitrè Prize in gold
• 1995 Ortutay Medal of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society Budapest
• 2004 Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from the American Folklore Society

Fonts

• Fairy tale, storyteller and storytelling community. Depicted in the Hungarian folk tradition. Berlin 1962 (publications by the Institute for German Folklore 23).
• Folktales and society. Story-telling in a Hungarian peasant community. Bloomington et al. a. 1989 (Metzler Collection; 55: Department E, Poetics).
• American folklore and the mass media. Bloomington et al. a. 1994 (folklore today).
• Legend and belief. Dialectics of a folklore genre. Bloomington [u. a.] 2001.

literature

• Vilmos Voigt : Dégh, Linda. In: Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales . Volume 3, 1981, Col. 375-377.

Web links

• Linda Dégh , obituary on Indiana University website.