Teaching Experience
When I discovered the field of folklore studies, I felt like I found the key to applied English studies and the humanities because folklorists study not just books and scholarly articles but texts in social and cultural contexts. I love teaching ways to recognize and ponder folklore as it happens in performance and also to collect, organize, and analyze certain genres, groups, and issues involved in what traditional expressions do for the people who share them.
Research
While myth, legend, and folktale may be studied through many interdisciplinary lenses, I consider them first as the world’s most relevant, instructive, enjoyable, and artful stories. I am fascinated by learning how and why these stories continue to be transmitted and transformed, and what they say about and do for the people who share them.
Selected Publications
• Fairy-Tale TV. Jill Terry Rudy and Pauline Greenhill. Routledge, 2020.
• Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures. Edited by Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc. Routledge, 2018.
• Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales and Television. Edited by Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy. Wayne State University Press, 2014.
• The Marrow of Human Experience: Essays on Folklore, by William A. Wilson. Edited by Jill Terry Rudy, assisted by Diane Call. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006.
• “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella: Agency and Possibility amidst Conflict and Wonder.” Narrative Culture 6.2 (2019): 161-187.
• “Baba Yaga, Monsters of the Week, and Pop Culture’s Formation of Wonder and Families through Monstrosity,” co-authored with Jarom McDonald. Humanities 5.2 (2016), 40. (http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/40) Also in ebook version, Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture.
Service
I see university, college, and department service as a form of leadership and mentoring that strengthens the growth and capacities of programs, colleagues, and students.
Citizenship assignments
• Associate Chair, BYU English Department
• Coordinator, BYU American Studies Program
• Book Review Editor, Journal of American Folklore
• Editor, The Folklore Historian
• Editorial Board, Journal of Folklore Research
• Board Member, Folklore Society of Utah
• BYU Faculty Advisory Board,
• College of Humanities Rank and Status Committee
• Board Member, Utah Folk Arts Panel