Ellen Stekert

Ellen Stekert (b. 1935) is an American academic, folklorist and musician.

Stekert is a Professor Emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and a former president of the American Folklore Society.

Stekert was born in New York City in 1935 and grew up in Great Neck on Long Island.

She survived polio as a child.

Stekert began performing folk music in high school and has recorded several albums.

Stekert attended Cornell University, where she took classes taught by the folklorist Harold Thompson, whom she also assisted in teaching.

As her interest in folklore grew, Stekert began doing fieldwork, collecting folksongs from traditional singers in upstate New York.

The songs Stekert collected from Ezra "Fuzzy" Barhight, a retired lumberjack from Cohocton, New York, she recorded and released as Songs of a New York Lumberjack in 1958.

After graduating in philosophy at Cornell, Stekert began a Masters degree in folklore at Indiana University.

There she continued her fieldwork, collecting folk songs in Kentucky and Southern Indiana.

On completion of her M.A., Stekert began research for a Ph.D. in folklore at Indiana.

She completed her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia due to the attitude towards her work of her supervisor at Indiana, Richard Dorson.

Stekert completed her Ph.D. in 1965.

Stekert's first teaching position was at Wayne State University in Detroit.

There, Stekert built upon the pioneering work of Thelma G. James in the collection of urban folklore traditions.

From there, she moved to the University of Minnesota where she was based for the rest of her academic career.

Stekert served as president of the American Folklore Society for the year 1977.

She was also appointed Minnesota's state folklorist.