The American Folklore Society, the country’s professional society for folklorists, has announced that Professor Marsha MacDowell of Michigan State University is the 2020 recipient of the society’s Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for significant lifetime achievement in the field of public folklore.
MacDowell is the curator of Folk Arts and Quilt Studies at the MSU Museum, in addition to a professor in MSU’s Art, Art History and Design Department. Her research interests include South Africa quiltmaking; traditions of patchwork covers in China; quilts and health; the history and meaning of lau hala in Hawaiian cultural history; folk arts, social justice and education; and the intersection of ethnography and museums in a digital age. She is the director of the award-winning Quilt Index, a digital repository of stories, images and other data related to quilts around the world, a project of MSU’s Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences.
Read the full story on the MSU Museum website.