Associate Professor
of English Margaret R. Yocom (Ph.D.,
English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst: 198O) is a
folklorist specializing in gender studies, family folklore, oral
narrative, and material culture. Since coming to George Mason
University in fall 1977, she has taught courses in freshman
composition, sophomore literature, popular culture, introduction
to the study of culture, and numerous folklore topics, including
folklore and literature, traditional art, traditional narrative,
folklore and gender, and ethnography. She teaches in PAGE, the
Study of the Americas, and crosslists courses with Women's
Studies and Anthropology. She also belongs to the Cultural Studies
faculty.
Professor Yocom has conducted fieldwork in her home Pennsylvania German culture as well as with the Inuit of northwestern Alaska and several Northern Virginia communities. Her major fieldsite is a North Appalachian mountain logging community in Maine. She has published articles with accompanying photographs on ethnographic fieldwork, regional study, ethnopoetics, family folklore, gender, and material culture. Her most recent work includes " 'Awful Real': Dolls and Development in Rangeley, Maine"(1993) and "The Yellow Ribboning of the USA: Contested Meanings in the Construction of a Political Symbol"(1996).
She is the assistant editor of Ugiuvangmiut Quliapyuit: King Island Tales(1988); and in 1994, she edited, produced, and wrote most of the text of Logging in the Maine Woods: The Paintings of Alden Grant. She is writing a book on the traditional art of a Maine logging family, entitled Generations in Wood.
Also active in public sector folklore, Professor Yocom
serves as consultant to the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum
as well as to various projects at the Smithsonian Institution,
the NEA, the NEH, and the Maine Arts Commission.