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David Clarke Intereviewed about CCL and the National Folklore Survey on ‘Look Up Sheffield’

David talks about the CCL National Folklore Survey, his interest in Folklore and his roots in Sheffield along with a number of related topics for the ‘Look Up Sheffield’ Newsletter HERE below is a short extract….

Tell us about the Centre for Contemporary Legend. How did that start?

Photograph © David Clarke 2025.

“It was a group of like-minded people, like-minded academics, coming together and saying, ‘Oh, you know we ought to set up a research group.’ But we’ve got an actual office now, a physical office at Sheffield Hallam Uni, for the project. We’ve got a new postdoctoral research associate starting in January who’s going to be working with me for two years on the survey, Sophie Parkes-Nield.

We’ve got Diane Rodgers, also of Sheffield Hallam, Andrew Robinson, Ceri Houlbrook and Owen Davies who founded the MA Folklore Studies course at Hertfordshire University, together with US sociology professor Christopher Bader.

So we will be surveying a sample of I think about 3, 000 people, and we can definitely say it will shine a light on modern folklore because this will be a gold standard survey, it won’t just be an anecdote here or an anecdote there. It’s great to have 10,000 collecting slips with bits of information about people’s ghost stories and sayings and dialect. But at the moment, those survey slips are just tied up with string sitting in a basement at University of Sheffield. I want something that will give us robust data.”

Read the full interview HERE

The National Folklore Survey for England

CCL are pleased to announce the launch of the National Folklore Survey for England #NFS

Photographs of English Calendar customs across the seasons (from top left – The Haxey Hood, Castleton Garland, Barwick in Elmet Maypole Rising, The Burning of the Bartle, The Antrobus Mummers, Allendale New Year’s Eve Tar Barrel Parade) © Andrew Robinson 2024.

This AHRC funded research project is being led by Dr David Clarke with Dr Diane Rodgers from Centre for Contemporary Legend at SHU along with Dr Ceri Houlbrook and Professor Owen Davies, who founded the MA Folklore Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. as co-leads The project’s international co-lead is Professor Christopher Bader, chair of the Department of Sociology, Chapman University, California, who has directed two large belief surveys in the USA.

The project aims to capture an accurate snapshot of the folklore of multicultural England and gain a new understanding of the impact of colonial and empire narratives on previous surveys. The timing is important as 2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the original Survey of Language and Folklore at the University of Sheffield and the ratification by the UK Government of the UNESCO convention for Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH).

For full details please Visit our new ‘National Folklore Survey’ section by clicking the NFS tab in the menu bar above.

#NFS lead contact email: david.clarke@shu.ac.uk