Joseph C. Harris

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Joseph C. Harris (born 1940)^[1] is Francis Lee Higginson Research Professor in English and Research Professor of Folklore at Harvard University.^[2]

Career[]

A scholar of Old English, Old Norse, folklore, and mythology, he earned a B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1961, a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1963 (with the support of a Marshall Scholarship), and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969 with a dissertation on Old Icelandic literature (The king and the Icelander; a study in the short narrative forms of Old Icelandic prose).^[3] He taught at Stanford and Cornell for thirteen years before returning to Harvard in 1985; he retired in 2012.^[4]

Some of his major works include Child’s Children: Ballad Study and Its Legacies (ed. with Barbara Hillers, 2012), ‘Speak Useful Words or Say Nothing’: Old Norse Studies by Joseph Harris (2008), and Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (ed. 1997). Author of over 100 scholarly articles, he also contributed to Seamus Heaney's best-selling translation of Beowulf.^[5]

His research has been supported by grants from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study,^[1] the German Academic Exchange Service, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation,^[6] the American Council of Learned Societies,^[7] the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Rockefeller Foundation.^[4] He is a corresponding fellow of the Royal Gustavus Adolpus Academy, Uppsala, Sweden.

References[]