Faculty

Dr. Michael Hoberman Associate Professor

Contact Information:
Room: Miller Hall, Room 23
Phone: 978-665-3746
Email: mhoberman@fsc.edu

Office Hours: Fall 2009 ~ TBA

Education

B.A. Reed College (American Studies)
M.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst (English and American Studies)
Ph.D. University of Massachusetts, Amherst (English and American Studies)

Courses Taught:

Folklore and American Culture
New England Literature and Culture
Ethnic American Literature
African American Literature (19th and 20th centuries)
American Novel After WWII
American Novel to 1950
Storytelling and the Oral Tradition
Mark Twain & American Humor
American Literature I
Children’s Literature
World Literature I
Writing I & II
Culture & Literature of Place & Regionalism, 1860-2000 (Graduate)
American Modernism (Graduate)
Jewish American Literature and Culture (Graduate)

Research Interests:

Folklore & Oral History
New England Literature & Culture

Current Projects:

I am completing a book Jews in Colonial New England, to be published in 2011 by UMASS Press. During 2008-2009, I conducted research for this book while on a long-term NEH Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

During the spring of 2010 I will be on leave from FSC and teaching in the Netherlands on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Representative Publications:

Publications: BOOKS

How Strange it Seems: Cultural Life of Jews in Small-Town New England.
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

Yankee Moderns: Folk Regional Identity in the Sawmill Valley of Western Massachusetts, 1890-1920,
University of Tennessee Press, 2000.

Publications—ARTICLES AND REVIEWS

“New England Folklore.” Chapter included in the New England volume of the American Regional
Cultures series. Greenwood Press (2004).

“The Names of the Flowers: Ruby Hemenway’s Redemption of History.” Frontiers: A
Journal of Women’s Studies, 25.1 (Winter/Spring 2004).

“The Jews,”“The Berkshires,” and “The Mohawk Trail” essays in The Encyclopedia of New England
Culture (eds. Burt Feintuch and David Watters). Yale University Press, 2005.

“Local Color: How Community Heritage Enhances Education.” Connection: New England's Journal of
Higher Education and Economic Development, XVI.1 (Summer 2001).

“High Crimes and Falling Factories: Nostalgic Utopianism in an Eclipsed New England Town,”
Oral History Review, 28.1 (Winter/Spring 2001).

“From Yankeedom to Hippiedom: A Public Folklorist Explores Four Generations of the Moores
Corner Store,” Journal of Applied Folklore Volume 5.

“Demythologizing Myth Criticism: Folklife and Modernity in Eudora Welty’s ‘Death of a Travelling
Salesman,” The Southern Quarterly, 30.1 (Fall, 1991): 24-34.

Book reviews published in Journal of American Folklore, Clio and Journal of the Illinois Historical
Society.

Senior Consulting Editor for folklife section of Encyclopedia of New England Culture