The African American Folklorist for the Month of June: Dr. Elisha Oliver

Each month, The African American Folklorist honors a Black scholar whose life’s work is immersed in the deep study and preservation of African American folkways, knowledge systems, and community truth-telling. For June, we recognize Dr. Elisha Oliver, a biocultural anthropologist, visual ethnographer, and Executive Director of Texas Folklife, as our African American Folklorist of the Month.

Dr. Oliver’s scholarship is rooted in lived experience, land memory, and embodied care. Her work crosses the fields of anthropology, folklore, health equity, and the arts, tracing the relationships between space, place, food environments, and Black wellness traditions. Through rigorous fieldwork and visual storytelling, she brings to light the narratives often overlooked in mainstream academia and institutional folklore.

In this episode, we’ll explore how Dr. Oliver uses film, photography, and the spoken word to document the intersections of storytelling, traditional healing, and environmental sustainability. We’ll discuss her contributions to the American Folklore Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and her role as a Zora Neale Hurston Award winner and Wenner-Gren Public Scholar Fellow. And we'll go deep, into land as medicine, Black maternal health, and the importance of centering community in every research question asked.

https://texasfolklife.org/
eoliver@texasfolklife.org