GRIMM LEGACIES

Updated 01/27/12: Updated with a map of the event site, and some lodging information for travellers from out of town. More information about the workshop being presented by Heidi Anne Heiner (of Sur La Lune Fairy Tales) on Friday afternoon, on the Schedule page. Continuing updates to the Participants’ bios and adjustments to the schedule. Please see the Pre-Registration page for info, including opportunity for lunch at the event!

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of the tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University will host a symposium to be held on February 3 and 4, 2012.

“Grimm Legacies” takes as its premise a line (“pasted on for eternity”) from Anne Sexton’s poem “Cinderella” and adds a question mark to the phrase to interrogate the seemingly timeless and universal hold of the cultural stories collected by the Brothers Grimm. Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, will deliver the keynote address.

The Symposium will directly address the question of how folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm in Germany of the early nineteenth century came to operate as a significant cultural legacy not only in Great Britain and the United States but also in other countries and cultures. It will focus on the origins of the tales, their geographical dissemination, their refashioning over the past two centuries, their role in shaping identity in childhood, and their resurrection in film and fiction for adult audiences.

For questions or more information, please contact Folklore & Mythology administrator Holly Hutchison (hhutchis@fas.harvard.edu).

(Top image: “The Frog Prince” by Maxfield Parrish, 1912 for Hearst’s Magazine)

Participants Illustrations Pre-Registration Schedule
Directions & Lodging