“Folklore and Oral Traditions: Rhetoric in Everyday Life”, 1980

Boxes 1-25

The Dwight Conquergood Papers fill 25 boxes and span the years 1974-2005; the bulk of the papers date from 1980 to 2002. The papers consist mostly of materials from his administrative work and the courses he taught at Northwestern; notebooks and other resources from his field research; and copies of papers and articles he authored.

Biographical files contain clippings about Conquergood (Box 1, Folders 2-3) and personal correspondence (Box 1, Folders 5-6; Box 2, Folders 1-4). They also include copies of his curricula vitae from various points in his career (Box 2, Folder 5) and the guest book and schedule of speakers from his memorial service held at Northwestern in January 2005 (Box 3, Folder 3).

The Northwestern University subseries includes class notes and student work from some of the courses Conquergood taught at Northwestern. It also includes university correspondence (Box 3, Folder 9; Box 4, Folders 1-3) and course and teacher evaluations (Box 4, Folders 4-5). The rest of the subseries is divided into three sections: the Department of Performance Studies, the Graduate School, and the School of Speech. The Department of Performance Studies section includes overviews of department's graduate (Box 10, Folder 5) and Ph.D. (Box 11, Folder 4) programs, as well as internal and external department reviews (Box 11, Folder 5). The Graduate School section includes materials from the 1999-2000 Curriculum Review Committee (Box 11, Folder 9) and the School of Speech section contains materials from the school's Task Force on Cultural Diversity (Box 11, Folders 14-15), both of which Conquergood served on.

The research subseries contains materials from Conquergood's four main areas of ethnographic field work: Albany Park, the Gaza Strip, Hmong refugees, and Chicago street gangs. Each section contains correspondence between Conquergood and his subjects, as well as other academics interested in his research. The correspondence in the street gangs section contains letters from incarcerated members of the Latin Kings (Box 16, Folder 7). Each section also contains field notebooks Conquergood used to record his research and other information pertaining to these groups. The Hmong refugees section contains English-to-Hmong dictionaries (Box 13, Folder 5) and translations of Hmong proverbs (Box 13, Folder 1). The street gangs section contains depositions Conquergood delivered for trials (Box 16, Folders 8-9), a copy of the Latin Kings' Manifesto (Box 16, Folder 11) and scrapbooks of the Kings' tags (Box 17, Folder 3). Items within each file are arranged chronologically.

The scholarship subseries contains information from conferences Conquergood spoke at or attended (Box 18, Folders 2-4; Box 19, Folder 1). The papers and publications sections contain copies of papers he presented at conferences and articles of his that were published in journals and anthologies.

The photographs subseries contains pictures and slides from Conquergood's field research, including pictures of Hmong immigrants, his visit to the Thai refugee camp Ban Vinai, and numerous images taken or used in his classroom.