Herbert Halpert

Biography

Herbert Norman Halpert first became interested in folklore as a teenager, and that fascination never left him. He went on to earn a master's degree in anthropology from Columbia University, where his teachers included Ruth Benedict and George Herzog, and later a doctorate in English from Indiana University under Stith Thompson. Both of his dissertations came from fieldwork he conducted on American folklore. During World War II, he served in the Alaskan Division of the Air Transport Command of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

After the war, he took a position as professor and head of the English department at Murray State College in Kentucky, where he pushed his students to gather local traditions. From 1956 to 1960, he worked as dean and professor of English and sociology at Blackburn College in Illinois. In 1960, he was a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas, and the next year he moved to New York City, teaching at the State University of New York until 1962.

That autumn, he became an associate professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. There, in 1968, he founded the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive, or MUNFLA, and carried out the bulk of the folklore research that made him internationally known. After his death, the materials from his office were given to MUNFLA as the Herbert Halpert Research Collection, assigned Accession Number 2012-037.

An award was also created to support presentations of folklore research drawn from that collection. The collection is considered unique because it has been carefully preserved and catalogued, allowing people to explore both the books and Halpert's handwritten notes in the margins.

Did You Know?

• Halpert earned his M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University, studying with Ruth Benedict and George Herzog.
• He earned his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University under the guidance of Stith Thompson.