Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology News

Folk Studies MA Student Georgia Ellie Dassler Receives PCAL Outstanding Graduate Student Award

In a virtual ceremony held on Friday, April 16, the WKU Graduate School honored the Outstanding Graduate Student Awardees from each college, including Folk Studies MA student Georgia Ellie Dassler who was chosen as the Potter College of Arts and Letters Outstanding Graduate Student. Dassler has also been named the Outstanding Folk Studies Graduate Student.

Dassler exemplifies excellence in scholarly and applied research and professional activities.  In her time as an MA student, Dassler presented a paper on her ongoing research, “Ballet Dancers' Personal Narratives of Pain and Injury,” at the 2020 (virtual) American Folklore Society Annual Meeting; she wrote two successful grant applications to the Kentucky Oral History Commission; and she secured two prestigious internships, as the (virtual) Folklife Intern for the North Carolina Arts Council in summer 2020 and with Long Island Traditions, deferred for her to summer 2021. 

Dassler completed a capstone project, “Folklife’s First Responders,” advised by Brent Bjorkman, based on her research about how public folklorists around the nation are approaching folklife research and programming in our pandemic world. This project resulted in a website that will serve as a resource for folklorists and other ethnographers and a book chapter co-authored with Folk Studies Associate Professor Kate Horigan to be published in an edited volume on the work of folklorists in responding to disaster.

In Dassler’s first year in the Folk Studies graduate program she served as editorial assistant for the Journal of American Folklore (JAF). According to Folk Studies director and former JAF Editor-in-Chief Ann K. Ferrell, “I came to rely on Ellie immediately. It was a challenging year in which we began the transition of the journal to new editors while simultaneously publishing our final issues, which essentially meant that Ellie was learning all aspects of the workings of the journal at the same time that she was assisting in training the new team.”

In spring 2020, she began her transition to the graduate assistantship position with the Kentucky Folklife Program (KFP), which she held in her second year. In this position, she serves as a member of the KFP team alongside KFP Director Brent Bjorkman and Folklife Specialist Joel Chapman. Her work included assisting in the development of “Connecting Across the Commonwealth in the Time of the Coronavirus,” a KFP project that engaged Kentuckians in virtual “story circles” to discuss how their lives were changing in the early months of the pandemic. She organized and facilitated virtual documentary watch parties and worked with the KFP team on grant writing and the implementation of NEA-funded projects such as the Southcentral Kentucky Musical Legacy Project, Kentucky Folklife online magazine, and the statewide virtual Kentucky Folklife Gathering held this past March.

The Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology congratulates Ellie on her many accomplishments and wishes her the best in the next steps of her career.