Awards

Guggenheim Fellow - 1966

About Warren E. Roberts

Born in 1924, Warren E. Roberts received in 1953 the first PhD in folklore awarded in the United States. At first a literary folklorist focused on traditional English and Scottish ballads, Warren turned to traditional material culture and folklife - the everyday life of rural Americans during the pre-Industrial period - after spending 1959-1960 in Norway under a Fulbright fellowship and an additional two months under a Guggenheim fellowship. Upon returning to Bloomington and Indiana University, he devoted his long and influential career to establishing an outdoor museum of early Indiana life and researching and writing about traditional material culture of the Hoosier state, most notably tree stump tombstones and log buildings. Warren E. Roberts died on February 1, 1999.