Rate My Professor Debra Lattanzi

Debra Lattanzi Shutika serves as Associate Professor and Director of the Folklore Studies Program in the Department of English at George Mason University. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a registered nurse. In 1993, she enrolled in George Mason University's English master's program, earning her M.A. in English literature before pursuing a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. Shutika's research interests encompass critical race theory, sense of place, Appalachian studies, contemporary Irish folklore, transnational migration, and ethnographic documentation. Her major publication, Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico (University of California Press, 2011), earned the prestigious 2012 Chicago Folklore Prize. Additional significant works include “Disrupting Folklore” and “The Mason Idea: Folklore for the 21st Century” in Advancing Folkloristics and Folklore in the United States and Canada (Indiana University Press, 2021), “The Folklorist as Department Chair” in What Folklorists Do (Indiana University Press, 2021), and “The Folklore Detective: Forensic Narrative Analysis” in Ethnologies (2019, Vol. 41, No. 1).

As director of the Mason-Library of Congress Field School for Cultural Documentation since 2010, Shutika has led over ten community-based projects, including studies of Arlington National Cemetery occupational culture, immigrant communities in Columbia Pike and Alexandria Waterfront, West Virginia coalfields, and community gardens in Arlington County and DC National Parks (the latter funded by the National Park Service). In 2022-2023, she was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Ireland, completing a folklore collection on women’s traditional agricultural practices in the Gaeltacht communities of Achill and Erris. She teaches folklore, ethnographic field documentation, Appalachian studies, Irish folklore and culture, digital storytelling, and sense of place. Shutika was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society and has held various committee roles.