Awards

Fulbright Award - 1993

Latvia

About Inta Carpenter

Inta Carpenter retired as a research scholar in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU in 2010. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Chatham College in 1966 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Folklore from IU in 1975 and 1989. She spent two years as a child welfare caseworker in Colorado before moving to Bloomington with her husband where she began her master’s degree. After receiving her master’s degree, Carpenter started at IU as an assistant director of special projects with the Folklore Institute and became associate director in 1978. She moved to the role of associate research scholar after completing her doctorate in 1989 where as a scholar, she dedicated herself to charting the Latvian exile experience in several locations around the world. Carpenter conducted her research on three different continents – Europe, North America, and South America. Also known as an activist scholar, she founded the Activist Pedagogy Group in the mid-1990s for a number of socially engaged activist projects at IU. In 1999 with funding from the Indiana Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts, Carpenter also founded Traditional Arts Indiana (TAI), a public folklore program in the folklore department at IU. Carpenter is an advisory editor for the Journal of Baltic Studies and associate editor of the Handbook of American Folklore. In 2004 to 2006, she served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. She has received numerous research grants including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Scholar Program, IREX, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.