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Final burst
As he nears retirement, foreign languages and literatures' James Dow isn't slowing
down one bit.
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Looking at his workload, you would never know that James Dow, professor
of foreign languages and literatures, is thinking about retirement.
He just recently published two books and has contacts to write two others.
He is preparing ten articles for publication and is either organizing
or speaking at three professional conferences in the coming months.
Dow is also teaching a full course load during the spring semester.
"It's been pretty busy," said Dow who is planning to retire
next January. "After spending the summer in Europe teaching at the
University of Bremen and working on my research I have been back four
times this academic year and plan on two more trips soon."
Trips to Europe, particularly Germany and Austria, is nothing new to Dow.
He says he has been to Vienna 15 times in a five-year span.
"For the past seven years Austria has been the focus of my research,"
he says. "Every spring break, Thanksgiving break and summer I go
there."
An internationally recognized scholar in German folklore, Dow has devoted
much of his recent work to writing the history of German and Austrian
folklore, including its complicity with National Socialist ideology. Dow
has found that while folklore may invoke images of quaint figures among
many of us, the Germans and Austrians used it much differently during
the Nazi regime.
He has been instrumental in discovering and revealing how National Socialist
ideology appropriated folklore studies in order to help define a "pure"
and "continuing" Germanic race in his books The Nazification
of an Academic Discipline, Folklore and Facisim, and in the 700 page
German volume Volkische Wissenschaft, for which he was a major
contributor.
One of his two new books, The Study of European Ethnology in Austria,
is due out April 27. Ethnology is a science that deals with the division
of human beings into races and their origin, distribution, relations and
characteristics.
Dow looks at ethnology in Austria before, during and after World War II,
including racist educational communities that adhered to a unique view
of the "myth-ritual" theory of mythology.
"This will be the most complete study of this area with lots of brand
new material," he said. "It's pretty harsh because the Austrians
haven't dealt with many of the issues of the past."
In another upcoming book, Dow is looking at the origin of the Cymbrian
language spoken only in small villages in northern Italy.
His research has uncovered a similar study, with old audiotapes made by
a German, Bruno Schweizer, during the early days of World War II. Schweizer
was a civilian employee of the National Socialist Cultural Commission
with responsibilities in linguistics.
Schweizer's private papers were donated by his wife after his death and
are housed in the German Language Atlas archives at the University of
Marburg in Germany. Dow has also made the acquaintance of Schweizer's
son and has thus acquired access to additional papers. He also traveled
to one of the remote Italian villages in February and met with one of
the few individuals who still speak the dying language.
He made the trip while attending an international UNESCO conference on
the language. Dow plans on attending an additional meeting on the subject
this summer in Germany and the following summer in Italy.
But most of Dow's European journeys aren't spent at conferences or remote
Italian villages. Instead his days are spent in the German Federal Archives
in Berlin and in the Salzburg State Folklore Archives in Austria.
"I literally sit and work my way through thousands of thousands of
pages in the archives," he said. "Most are not useful, but then
you uncover those that lead to something really fascinating."
Around LAS
April 19 to May 9, 2004
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