Folklore Studies

About RMN Newsletter

Photo: Bergen, Norway, from aboard Den gode Hensigt.

RMN Newsletter was planned as a bi-annual publication at the meeting which concluded the first official event of the Retrospective Methods Network (RMN), the international conference New Focus on Retrospective Methods, 13th–14th September, 2010.  The immediate intention of the newsletter was to generate a regular channel for contact and communication among both active and passive members of the Retrospective Methods Network, because an international network cannot be maintained without communication.

The RMN is an open social network intended bring together scholars interested in using evidence from one period for developing an understanding of the same or a corresponding phenomenon in an earlier period.  In other words, the RMN is united by an interest in the problems, approaches, strategies and limitations related to approaching some aspect of culture in one period through evidence from another, later period, and it is open to all scholars who share in those interests.  Such research includes assessments of continuity between historical periods, historical relationships between synchronic forms of a tradition in the same or diverse cultures, and also uses of analogical comparisons in which parallels are purely typological.  Because the focus is on practical and constructive strategies, the network is multi-disciplinary, although the majority of the network’s members are presently in various fields related to medieval studies, folklore studies, linguistics, archaeology and history.

RMN Newsletter is an open access publication that is intended to have two primary functions:

1. As a medium for maintaining contact among widely distributed scholars who share in these interests
2. As a medium for keeping more generally abreast of activities, research and events which are relevant to scholars who share in these interests

It is primarily oriented to constructing an informational resource and discourse space for researchers on an individual basis, connecting them with the RMN as an open social network. 

The newsletter is developed around a basic organizational schema of five sections: “Comments and Communications”, “People”, “Faculties, Institutions and Organizations”, “Reviews”, and “Calls for Papers”.  The orientation of the newsletter is not the publication of research articles, but rather information about events, people, activities, developments and technologies, and research which is ongoing or has been recently completed.

At this point, the heart of the newsletter is the People section.  This section is centrally constituted of abstracts of both publications and presentations at conferences.  As such, it is also very much dependent on the interest of scholars contributing these abstracts (which often requires little more than attaching it to an e-mail) in order to make them available to a broader audience of common interests.  Making abstracts of presented and published works available through an open access publication provides an effective medium for keeping track of what other scholars and researchers with similar interests are doing. 

The emerging generation of scholars is extremely significant across our diverse disciplines and it is important to both be aware of that generation and open contact with it. We therefore include subsections on PhD dissertation projects and MA thesis projects which are ongoing or have recently been completed. 

The section Faculties, Institutions and Organizations is oriented to more general information about activities at the level of organizations. 

The Comments and Communications section is intended to construct a venue for the presentation of news, information, discussions and brief contributions to the broader discourse of our many intersecting fields. This is planned as a venue introducing problems, questions, possibilities and approaches for dialogue rather than concluding examinations, analyses or interpretations, which we hope to include as abstracts in the People section.