Beverly J. Stoeltje

Beverly J. Stoeltje is an emeritus professor in both the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. She also serves as Affiliated Faculty in African Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and at the Russian-East European Institute. Stoelje has been described as one of the "official foremothers of feminist folkloristics".

Biography Stoeltje earned her B.S. in Education in 1961, from the University of Texas, Austin. She remained at the University of Texas for her M.A. (1973) and her Ph.D. (1979) in Folklore (Folkloristics) within the graduate folklore program of the UT Department of Anthropology, and continued to teach there before joining Indiana University Bloomington in 1986.

Stoeltje's dissertation and early work was focused on the American West and, in particular, on her home state of Texas.

Stoeltje's later research continued to focus on her initial interests in performance, ritual, and gender; in 1990 she spent a year in Ghana funded by the Fulbright Program,

She was interviewed by Rebecca Tannenbaum in 2011 for the "Scholars of feminism" oral history program of University of Wisconsin–Madison. Stoeltje retired in 2019, when panels entitled "With a Riata in Her Hand: Honoring the Scholarship of Beverly Stoeltje" were organized at meetings of the American Folklore Society and the American Anthropological Association.

Reception Stoelje is described in the Encyclopedia of Women's Folklore and Folklife as one of the "official foremothers of feminist folkloristics". Olaf Hoerschelmann discusses her work on ritual and festival in a modern society, originally formulated in response to rodeo, in the context of American televised quiz shows, and Jiva Nath Lamsal applies this work to the rituals surrounding death in the Nepalese Gaijatra festival.

Selected publications Books Stoeltje, Beverly (1979). Children's Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play. Austin: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Stoeltje, Beverly, Colleen Ballerino Cohen, and Richard Wilk, eds. (1995). Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests and Power. New York: Routledge. Research articles Stoeltje, Beverly J. (1975). "A Helpmate for Man Indeed": The Image of the Frontier Woman. The Journal of American Folklore 88 (347): 25–41 Stoeltje, Beverly J. (1993). Power and the Ritual Genres: American Rodeo. Western Folklore 52 (2/4): 135–156 Stoeltje, Beverly J. (1997). Asante queen mothers: A study in female authority. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 810 (1): 41–71