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The prestigious Professional and Scholarly Excellence Award of the Association of American Prose Publishers has been awarded to The Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore, edited by Margaret Hiebert Beissinger of Princeton University and published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Two researchers from the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS) contributed to the publication as authors: Dr Sanja Zlatanović from the Institute of Political Sciences, SAS, and Jana Piroščáková, who at the time was affiliated with the Institute of Slovak Literature, SAS.

Dr Sanja Zlatanović authored a chapter on Serbian wedding practices in post-war Kosovo (pp. 60-82). The chapter is based on extensive field research conducted in southeastern Kosovo after the 1998-1999 war. It examines the relationship between ethnicity and other forms of collective identity in a radically transformed political and social environment.

Although weddings are private rituals, they involve numerous participants and public activities. Their content, form, and meaning serve to express identities, particularly ethnic, religious, regional, local, and gender identities. Through visual elements, such as the use of national flags, and narratives, including songs with national or nationalist themes, as well as their performative nature, weddings become highly susceptible to politicisation. In this sense, they function as sensitive indicators of deeper social processes and tensions, including changes in family and gender relations.

Jana Piroščáková, then affiliated with the Institute of Slovak Literature, SAS, focuses in her chapter (pp. 628-654) on the collections Slovenské povesti and Prostonárodné slovenské povesti, compiled by Pavol Dobšinský (1828-1885). Although these collections are not authentic records of Slovak fairy tales, they form the foundation of knowledge about Slovak oral folk narrative traditions and have had a lasting influence on them.

Romantic ideas about national art strongly influenced Dobšinský. The tales in his collections exhibit a distinctive style shaped by his deliberate adaptation of folk variants through compilation and stylisation. The chapter analyses this characteristic style, the methods by which Dobšinský achieved it, his preference for specific types of magical tales, and how these narratives were interpreted to express Slovak nationalism. The international ATU index of folktale types is used to classify the discussed material.

Further information about the publication is available HERE.

Prepared by: Juraj Marušiak, Institute of Political Sciences, SAS