Teacher, Mentor, and ColleagueIt is no exaggeration to say that beginning with his return from Norway until his retirement in 1996, Warren’s inspiration and guidance molded young graduate students into America’s finest scholars of material culture and folklife. Many of them used their training and experience to establish respected careers in parallel fields such as historic preservation, cultural conservation, and museum administration. The holistic approach of examining cultural items in context has enriched our understanding of the past and the people who inhabited it, and the expansion of the corpus to include common, everyday objects—barns and gravestones, chairs and coverlets— has balanced the scale that has too long been weighted to the upper levels of society. "I am happy to be able to say that folklife research is flourishing thanks to the abilities and efforts of a thriving number of younger scholars (younger than I, that is). I feel it is my greatest contribution to folklife studies, and certainly my proudest boast, that many of these scholars did their graduate studies at the Folklore Institute of Indiana University and that I was chair or co-chair for their Ph.D. committees. What I have written over the years is a small contribution compared to those made by my ex-students." "Afterword,” in Viewpoints, 311.
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About Warren E. Roberts
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Southern Indiana Field School