Thomas A. DuBois

Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Studies, Folklore, and Religious Studies,
University of Wisconsin–Madison

Tom DuBois received his Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in
1990 and his undergraduate degree in English (medieval studies focus) from Cornell University
in 1983. Since 2000, he has researched, taught, and frequently chaired in the departments of
Scandinavian Studies, Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies, and Religious Studies at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 1990 to 2000, he taught at the University of Washington,
Seattle, and has held visiting lectureships in Folklore Studies, Ethnology, and Sámi Studies at
Harvard University, the University of Helsinki, Stockholm University, the University of Oslo,
and Umeå University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011. In 2013, he was
inducted into Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur (the Royal Gustavus
Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture). He is a former president of the Society for the
Advancement of Scandinavian Study, a former co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore,
and a past recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Mellon, and Guggenheim foundations.

His books include Finnish Folk Poetry and the Kalevala (1995), Nordic Religions in the Viking
Age (1999), Lyric, Meaning and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe (2006), An
Introduction to Shamanism (2009), and the edited or co-edited volumes Finnish Folklore (2000),
Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia (2008), and The Nordic
Storyteller: Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen (2009).

At SCAS, he will work on a comprehensive revision of his influential book Nordic Religions in the
Viking Age in preparation for a twentieth-anniversary reissue.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2016-17.