Rate My Professor Debra Lattanzi Shutika

Shutika's major publication is the book Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico (University of California Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Chicago Folklore Prize from the American Folklore Society and University of Chicago. Recent articles include “The Folklorist as Department Chair” in What Folklorists Do (Indiana University Press, 2021), “The Mason Idea: Folklore for the 21st Century” in Folklore in the United States and Canada (Indiana University Press, 2021), “Disrupting Folklore” in Advancing Folkloristics (Indiana University Press, 2021), and “The Folklore Detective: Forensic Narrative Analysis” in Ethnologies (2019). In 2022-2023, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland, conducting ethnographic research on women’s traditional agricultural practices in the Gaeltacht regions of Achill and Erris. She directs the Mason-Library of Congress Field School for Cultural Documentation, providing hands-on training to students from folklore, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology in projects such as community gardens in DC national parks, Manassas Battlefield, and international sites. Shutika has been elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society and received the CHSS Distinguished Alumni-Faculty Award. Formerly, she served as Associate Editor for the Journal of American Folklore, contributing to the field's editorial leadership.