Linda Dégh

Linda Dégh-Vázsonyi was raised and educated in Hungary where she graduated from Péter Pázmány University. She began her teaching career at the Eötvös Loránd University's Folklore Department in Budapest, before accepting an appointment at the Folklore Institute of Indiana University, Bloomington in 1965. At that time, a new graduate curriculum in the Folklore Institute needed an Europeanist to enhance its already distinguished reputation. She became an Indiana University Distinguished Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 1982. Linda Dégh was a folklorist/ethnologist, specializing in personal and communal identity projections of traditional rural and modern urban communities in Europe and North America. Through personal observation of creative processes in communicating folklore, traditional prose narratives in particular, taking into account historical and situational contexts of performance, she focused not on the text prototype, but on the unique, personal formulations of individuals generated by unpredictable given conditions. Dégh's 18 books and over 200 essays have been internationally recognized as initiators of a new approach to folklore study. Her monographic survey "Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre" in 2001, exhibited emergence of stories form novel technological conditions in the U.S. spreading speedy to other industrially advanced nations, expressing fears and concerns of survival in a new world of alienation, globalization, and violence through the defense mechanism rationalizing the irrational.