I am Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington, where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses, including Folklore and Science of Childhood, Folklore of the American South, Folkloristics and Genre Theory, Bodylore, and The Science of Animal Folklore. I also serve as editor of Children’s Folklore Review. I am affiliate faculty in cognitive science and have taught an undergraduate introduction to cognitive science.

I am interested in studying the intersections of folklore and cognitive science as windows into the nature of human minds. I research, for example, children’s traditionalized play with perceptual illusions (i.e., folk illusions) as a way to think about how humans come to understand our bodies and our perceptual systems. I am currently extending my interest in humans’ tendency to anthropomorphize animals to address how we relate to artificial intelligence.

With cognitive linguist Claiborne Rice, I co-authored Folk Illusions: Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception (Indiana University Press, 2019), winner of the Iona and Peter Opie Prize for Books on Children’s Folklore. With comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, I co-edited The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm: An Unlikely Intersection of Folklore and Science (Indiana University Press, 2021), a book that examines the rich overlaps in folkloric and scientific ideas about non-human animal minds. My scholarly writing appears in Journal of American Folklore, Folklore, Western Folklore, Journal of Folklore and Education and article focusing on my interdisciplinary research projects have appeared in The Psychologist and Scientific American: Mind. From 2019 to 2024, I served as convener of the Folklore and Science Section of the American Folklore Society (AFS), and I currently serve as the convener for AFS’s Children’s Folklore Section.