Joseph C. Harris (born 1940) is Francis Lee Higginson Research Professor in English and Research Professor of Folklore at Harvard University.

Career

A scholar of Old English, Old Norse, folklore, and mythology, he earned a B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1961, a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1963 (with the support of a Marshall Scholarship), and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969 with a dissertation on Old Icelandic literature (''The King and the Icelander: a study in the short narrative forms of Old Icelandic prose''). He taught at Stanford and Cornell for thirteen years before returning to Harvard in 1985; he retired in 2012. Some of his major works include ''Child’s Children: Ballad Study and Its Legacies'' (ed. with Barbara Hillers, 2012), ''‘Speak Useful Words or Say Nothing’: Old Norse Studies by Joseph Harris'' (2008), and ''Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse'' (ed. 1997). Author of over 100 scholarly articles, he also contributed to Seamus Heaney's best-selling translation of ''Beowulf''. His research has been supported by grants from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, the

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, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a corresponding fellow of the Royal Gustavus Adolpus Academy, Uppsala, Sweden.

References

American literary critics American medievalists Harvard University faculty Living people Harvard University alumni 20th-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American non-fiction writers University of Georgia alumni 1940 births Alumni of the University of Cambridge American expatriates in the United Kingdom {{DEFAULTSORT:Harris, Joseph