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While completing his MA in literary studies from Syracuse University and the PhD in folklore studies from IU’s Folklore Institute, Dr. Laudun was grateful for the support of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (1987-1992) and a MacArthur Scholarship at the Indiana Center for Global Change and World Peace (1993-94). Grants secured include funding from the Grammy Foundation and the Louisiana Board of Regents. He was honored by a fellowship with the EVIA Digital Archive and a scholarship in residence with UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. His first book, The Amazing Crawfish Boat, is a longitudinal ethnographic study of creativity and tradition within a material folk culture domain. His second book (due out soon) is A Pirate in a Tree: Cultural Memory and Slavery. A third book on How Stories Work is in process.

Ph.D. in Folklore Studies, 1999
Indiana University

M.A. in Literary Studies, 1989
Syracuse University

B.A. in Philosophy & English
Louisiana State University

• 2024. Mistaken for Narrative: Rethinking the Status of Narrative in Legends and Conspiracy Theories. American Folklore Society (Albuquerque, NM).
• 2024. Using an LLM to Map the Structure of Conspiracy Theories. College of Liberal Arts Colloquium (Lafayette, LA).
• 2023. Speaking Subjects, Subjects Spoken: Using TED Talks to Understand Discursive Gender Formations. Text as Data/TADA (Amherst, MA). With Katherine M. Kinnaird and Allison J. B. Chaney.
• 2023. Folklore’s Nature & Memory’s Coefficient. American Folklore Society (Portland, OR).
• 2023. Who’s Afraid of ChatGPT: Legends as/and Large Language Models. International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (Sheffield, UK).