Emily Bianchi
Contact Information
Visiting Assistant Professor
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Office Hours
Thursday 10 AM-12 PM for Autumn 2025
Areas of Expertise
- Folklore—traditional, vernacular, expressive culture including verbal art, custom, and material culture—in the US
- Oral traditions and verbal art, the ethnography of communication, performance studies
- Politics of culture, identity, and tradition
- Vernacular religion
- Vernacular history and social memory, commemoration
- The intersection of material culture and oral narrative
- Community-constructed resources, museums, and sites of display
- US intentional communities, separatist communities, and religious movements
Education
- PhD Indiana University, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
- MA Virginia Tech, Department of Religion and Culture
Emily recently received her PhD in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University. Her dissertation, Monastic Memories at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, is an ethnography of storytelling of the Shaker community in New Gloucester, Maine. It explores how pithy anecdotes documented in archival records and told by Brother Arnold Hadd act as a vernacular history of Maine Shakerism, a mechanism for the continual process of conversion to the Shaker faith, a series of lessons on practicing radical love while living amongst imperfect people, and a philosophy of human nature and community.