Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and has carried out folklore research in Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the other islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean. He is the author of Verbal Arts in Madagascar and Stars and Keys (IUP 2007), a collection of folktale translations from the Indian Ocean islands.

Foreword
Michael Dylan Foster and Ray Cashman
Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century
Alan Dundes
Introduction
America's Antitheoretical Folkloristics
Lee Haring
The Sweep of Knowledge: The Politics of Grand and Local Theory in Folkloristics
Gary Alan Fine
What('s) Theory?
Margaret A. Mills
The Philology of the Vernacular
Richard Bauman
Humble Theory
Dorothy Noyes
Grand Theory, Nationalism, and American Folklore
John W. Roberts
There is No Grand Theory in Germany, and for Good Reason
James R. Dow
Responses
What Theory Is
Newton Garver
Weak Theory in an Unfinished World
Kathleen Stewart
"Or in Other Words": Recasting Grand Theory
Kirin Narayan
Disciplining Folkloristics
Charles L. Briggs
Afterwords
Reflections on Grand Theory, Graduate School, and Intellectual Ballast
Chad Edward Buterbaugh
Ten Years After
Lee Haring

Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and has carried out folklore research in Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the other islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean. He is the author of Verbal Arts in Madagascar and Stars and Keys (IUP 2007), a collection of folktale translations from the Indian Ocean islands.