Sabina Magliocco facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sabina Magliocco
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | December 30, 1959 Topeka, Kansas, U.S.
|
| Alma mater | |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | |
Sabina Magliocco (born in 1959) is a professor who studies people and their cultures (this is called anthropology). She also teaches about different religions. She works at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Before that, she taught at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).
Professor Magliocco writes many books and articles. Her work is about interesting topics like folklore (old stories and traditions), religious festivals, how people eat (called foodways), witchcraft, and a modern religion called Neo-Paganism. She has studied these topics in both Europe and the United States.
She has received special awards and support from important groups like the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also an honorary fellow of the American Folklore Society. From 2004 to 2009, she was the editor for a journal called Western Folklore. At CSUN, she helped a group called CSUN Cat People. This group worked to care for feral cats (wild cats) on the university campus.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Sabina Magliocco was born on December 30, 1959, in Topeka, Kansas. Her parents were immigrants from Italy. Her father first came to the United States in 1953. He had a special scholarship called a Fulbright Fellowship to study brain and nerve medicine. Her mother joined him after they got married in 1958.
From 1960 to 1976, her family spent their summers in Italy. They visited cities like Rome and towns in regions like Lazio and Tuscany. In 1966, her family moved from Topeka to Cincinnati. Sabina finished high school at Walnut Hills High School (Cincinnati, Ohio) in 1977.
She went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1980, she graduated with high honors (magna cum laude) with a degree in anthropology. She then continued her studies at Indiana University. There, she earned her master's degree in 1983 and her PhD in 1988. Her main focus was folklore, with a side study in anthropology.
Teaching and Research Career
After finishing her studies, Professor Magliocco did more research in Italy in 1989. She then began teaching classes about folklore and anthropology. From 1990 to 1994, she taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She also taught at other universities like UCLA and UC Berkeley.
From 1997 to 2017, she taught at California State University, Northridge. She even became the head of the Anthropology Department there in 2007. In 2017, she moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. There, she is a Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology.
Her teaching and research cover many topics. These include:
- Rituals, festivals, and religions
- Folklore and how people express their culture (like stories, beliefs, and traditional crafts)
- Magic and witchcraft
- Modern Pagan religions
- Stories and how they are told
- Questions about identity for different ethnic groups or regions
- Gender studies
- How cultures are studied and understood
- Animal studies
- Methods for studying cultures in real-life settings (called ethnographic methodology)
Exploring Cultures and Beliefs
Professor Magliocco has done a lot of fieldwork, which means she travels to places to study people and their cultures up close.
Studies in Italy
In the 1980s, she studied in northwestern Sardinia, Italy. She looked at how old traditions and festivals in a farming community were changing. Her books The Two Madonnas and Le due Marie di Bessude came from this research. She is also working on a project about traditional healing practices in Italy.
Modern Witchcraft and Paganism
Professor Magliocco has also studied modern Neopagans in the San Francisco Bay Area. This research led to her books Witching Culture and Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars. She has written many articles about witchcraft and the modern American interest in Italian-American Stregheria. She is also a member of Gardnerian Wicca, which is a type of modern witchcraft.
Festivals in England
In Cornwall, England, she studied the Padstow May Day celebration. This fieldwork helped her write Oss Tales.
Television Appearances
From 2012 to 2014, Professor Magliocco appeared on 17 episodes of the History Channel show, Ancient Aliens. She shared her knowledge about folklore related to the themes of each episode. She also appeared on three episodes of the Scary Tales TV series in 2011.
