Folklore & Folklife News Fall 2006

October 2006

Folklore has moved to Fiji House!

In September, 2006, the offices of the Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife, the Center for Folklore and Ethnography, the Archive of Folklore, and the auxiliary office for Visiting Lecturers, CFE Fellows, TAs and RAs moved from the third floor of Logan Hall to the fourth floor of the once and future fraternity house at 3619 Locust Walk. The handsome Gothic structure, designed by architects Mellor and Meigs, was built in 1913 financed by the brothers of Phi Gamma Delta, a fraternity known in the Greek community as "Fiji." Likenesses of the faces of some of the early brothers peer out between leaves and nuts ornately carved into the woodwork of the Chapter Room, also known as the Moose Room, for the taxidermic specimen mounted on one of the walls. Our neighbors here include the Penn Humanities Forum, the Centers for Teaching and Learning and Communication Within the Curriculum, and the Old High German Etymological Dictionary. From its location on the national register, Fiji House has resisted such icons of modernization as elevators and central air conditioning. Utilizing energy from the sun, we scamper up four flights of stairs, the last spiraling through an encircling tower. Behind the parapets, across from the Steinberg Hall of the Wharton School, we pick up where we left off, with research, archiving, teaching, writing, fieldwork, fundraising, and exams and dissertations. Please click on any of these activities for more information.

<< Return to the previous page