Oral Literature in Africa

Ruth Finnegan is a Visiting Research Professor and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. Her particular interests are in the anthropology/sociology of artistic activity, communication, and performance; debates relating to literacy, 'orality' and multimodality; and amateur and other 'hidden' activities. She has published widely on aspects of communication and expression, especially oral performance, literacy, and music-making. Her publications include Limba Stories and Story-Telling (1967, 1981); Oral Poetry (1977; 2nd edn 1992); Information Technology: Social Issues (joint ed., 1987); Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (1988); Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (1992); Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection (2002); and The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (2007). Her most recent book, Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation was published in 2011, and, to appear around 2013, an edited study of dreaming and telepathy. Ruth Finnegan was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996 and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford in 1997; she was awarded an OBE for services to Social Sciences in 2000. Under the pen name of Catherine Farrar she has also published the first two parts of fantasy-fictional 'The Self Quartet', namely The Little Angel and the Three Wisdoms and Three Ways of Loving; also a collection of short stories, The Wild Thorn Rose. She can be reached at: r.h.finnegan@open.ac.uk