Henry Glassie

Life and career

Henry Glassie received his B.A. from Tulane University in 1964, his M.A. from the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1965, and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. After serving as the State Folklorist of Pennsylvania and teaching at Penn State Harrisburg, Glassie began teaching in the Folklore Institute at Indiana University Bloomington in 1970. In 1976, he became the chairman of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1988, he returned as a College Professor to Indiana University, where he had appointments in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, American Studies, Central Eurasian Studies, Ancient Near East Studies, and India Studies. He retired in 2008. Glassie has served as president of the American Folklore Society, the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and his local historic preservation organization, Bloomington Restorations Incorporated. He is married to fellow folklorist Pravina Shukla, a professor at Indiana University, who is a teacher and the author of two major books on dress and adornment, The Grace of Four Moons and Costume.

Glassie and Shukla co-authored Sacred Art, an Ethnographic Account of creativity in Northeastern Brazil. Glassie has four children and four grandchildren. Henry Glassie began doing fieldwork on the songs, stories, and architecture of the Southern Appalachian region in 1961. He has since done fieldwork in several regions of the United States, and in Ireland, England, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Nigeria, and Brazil.

He published his first scholarly paper, an article on the Appalachian log cabin, in 1963. Since then, he has published over 100 articles and a steady stream of books.

Books by Henry Glassie

Glassie's books include Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (1968), Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (1976), All Silver and No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming (1976), Irish Folk History: Texts from the North (1982), Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (1982), Irish Folktales (1985), The Spirit of Folk Art (1989), Günümüzde Geleneksel Türk Sanatı (1993), Turkish Traditional Art Today (1993), Art and Life in Bangladesh (1997), Material Culture (1999), The Potter’s Art (1999), Vernacular Architecture (2000), The Stars of Ballymenone (2006), Prince Twins Seven-Seven: His Art, His Life in Nigeria, His Exile in America (2010), and Daniel Johnston: A Portrait of the Artist as a Potter in North Carolina (2020).

Co-authored books include A Guide for Collectors of Oral Traditions and Folk Cultural Material in Pennsylvania (1968, with MacEdward Leach), Forms upon the Frontier: Folklife and Folk Art in the United States (1969, with Austin and Alta Fife), Folksongs and Their Makers (1970, with Edward D. Ives and John F. Szwed), Folklore Today: A Festschrift for Richard M. Dorson (1976, with Linda Dégh and Felix Oinas), Living Traditions (2007, with Firoz Mahmud), Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line (2015, with Clifford R. Murphy and Douglas Dowling Peach), Borderlines (2018, with Vincent Woods), and Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil (2018, with Pravina Shukla).

Honors and awards

Glassie received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972. He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Institute, Yale University in 1975. He became a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 1976. Passing the Time in Ballymenone won the Chicago Folklore Prize in 1983 and the Haney Prize in the Social Sciences in 1982, and was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1982.

He received the American Folklore Society Centennial Award of the Folk Art Section in 1989. He became a Folklore Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 1990. The Spirit of Folk Art won the Kiffen Award of the Pioneer American Society in 1990 and was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1990. He received an Award of Honor for Superior Service to Turkish Culture from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Turkey) in 1993, and the Douglas Distinguished Service Award of the Pioneer American Society in 1993.

Turkish Traditional Art Today was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1994. He received the Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award from the Assembly of Turkish American Associations in 1995. He received the Teaching Excellence Recognition Award from Indiana University in 1997. Art and Life in Bangladesh received a Certificate of Honour from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs (Bangladesh) in 1998 and a Crest of Honour from Islamic University, Kushtia, Bangladesh in 1998.

He received the Warren Roberts Award from Bloomington Restorations Incorporated in 2000, an Encomium for service to historic preservation from the Bloomington City Council in 2000, and the Friend of Bangladesh Award from FOBANA in 2000. Vernacular Architecture won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award of the Vernacular Architecture Forum in 2001. He received a Board of Trustees Recognition for Contributions to Turkish Cultural Life from Fatih University, Istanbul in 2001.

He received an Award of Honorary Citizenship from the Municipal Government of Kütahya, Turkey in 2010. He received the American Folklore Society Award for a Lifetime of Scholarly Achievement in 2010.

Prince Twins Seven-Seven won the Nigerian Studies Association Book Award in 2011. He received the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies in 2011. Ola Belle Reed received a Certificate of Merit from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in 2016.

Writings about Glassie

Charles Joyner wrote about Glassie in Shared Traditions (1999). Gregory Hansen conducted an interview published in Folklore Forum in 2000. Mark P. Leone wrote about Glassie in The Public Historian in 2001.

Barbara Truesdell contributed a piece to The Public Historian in 2008. Ray Cashman, Tom Mould, and Pravina Shukla edited a volume titled The Individual and Tradition (2011) that includes a chapter on Glassie's work. A film about Glassie, directed by Pat Collins and titled Henry Glassie: Field Work, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.