Kitta Wins 2020 Chicago Folklore Prize

Dr. Andrea Kitta won the 2020 Chicago Folklore Prize for her book The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press, 2019). This is the highest book award in the discipline of folklore and a major achievement. ECU News featured Kitta’s award-winning book recently on its site.

First awarded in 1928 and given to the author(s) of the best book (or occasionally of the best two books) of folklore scholarship for the year, the Chicago Folklore Prize is the oldest international award recognizing excellence in folklore scholarship. The prize is offered jointly by the American Folklore Society and the University of Chicago. Dr. Kitta is the most recent in a long line of fine folklorists who have been honored for their excellent prize-winning books for more than three-quarters of a century.

On Oct. 17 and 18, Kitta will be featured in “Radical Death Reads” with The Collective for Radical Death Studies. The CRDS “mission is to interrogate the field of Death Studies to decolonize and de-center whiteness while calling to radicalize death practices, all in theory and in practice from a variety of angles, i.e. our research, writing, community work, and professional careers.”

Lastly, Kitta’s, essay “Why Are Ghosts So White?” was just published at The Order of the Good Death.

Go English!