Sarah Craycraft

As Head Tutor, I collaborate with Folklore and Mythology students to design their curriculums and senior thesis projects. I teach the Folklore and Mythology sophomore tutorial, FOLKMYTH 97: Fieldwork and Ethnography (spring), FOLKMYTH 120: Folklore and Appalachia or FOLKMYTH 121: From Trad Lives to Trad Wives: Contemporary Homesteading (rotating spring courses), and GENED 1196: Tradition in Everyday Life (fall), which double counts as the introductory course for Folklore & Mythology concentrators and secondaries. Harvard students are welcome to schedule a meeting with me through Calendly. 

My scholarship explores intergenerational dynamics of cultural continuity, care, and the recuperative circulation of value (of people, places, ideas, and objects); the infrastructures that support or fail to support resilient living and intergenerational reciprocity; and the sociocultural discourses within which we age and perceive aging.

My book in progress, The Village Project: Rural Revitalization in Contemporary Bulgaria, explores the intersections of recuperative practices, heritagization, and intergenerational relationality in contemporary Bulgaria, through a folkloristic lens. I look to their engagements in personal life projects, civic projects, and arts projects to better understand intergenerational meanings attached to the Bulgarian village, and I consider the ways that older villagers, especially grandmothers, are romanticized and scripted as recipients of intergenerational care.. (Manuscript under contract with University of Wisconsin Press, expected June 2026). 

My broader interests include space, place, and commemoration; critical heritage studies; and aging and generations. I am committed to community engaged, public facing scholarship and the use of feminist methodologies including reciprocal ethnography and participatory action research.

I received my PhD in Comparative Cultural Studies and Folklore from Ohio State University. Prior to joining Harvard’s Folklore & Mythology program, I was Visiting Assistant Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. A first-generation college graduate, I grew up in southwestern Ohio, at the border of the Midwest and the Appalachian foothills. Outside of class and advising, I am an avid embroider and ultimate frisbee player, and a novice of Bulgarian horo (folk dance). I serve on the International Connections Committee of the Appalachian Studies Association, and the Editorial Board of The Journal of American Folklore. I also co-organize the Folklorists of Appalachia working group alongside Dr. Jordan Lovejoy of UNC Chapel Hill and serve as Vice President of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association. I have also served on the Steering Committee of the Midwest Folklorists and Cultural Workers Alliance.

Publications

“An Urban Project in Rural Crisis: Responding to Coronavirus in Bulgarian Villages.” FOLKLORICA—Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association. 24 (July 2021):1-26.

“Young in the Village: ‘The Project’ in Rural Revitalization Work.” Bulgarian Ethnology. 1 (2022): 123-140.

“Playing with the Past: ‘Momata Barbie’ and Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter as Two Folkloric Futures'.” The Collective