Welcome visitors from UL-Lafayette! I maintain my faculty profile here on my personal website so that it can be updated readily and regularly.

Professor of English and Folklore Studies. (B.A., Philosophy & English, Louisiana State University; M.A., Syracuse, 1989; Ph.D., Indiana University, 1999.)

Office: H. L. Griffin 356, 337-482-5493, laudun AT louisiana.edu
Pronouns: he/him/his

Teaching and Research Areas: narrative studies, culture analytics, text mining, computational humanities, creativity studies.

Noteworthy: While completing the MA in literary studies from Syracuse University and the PhD in folklore studies from IU’s Folklore Institute, I was grateful for the support of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (1987-1992) and a MacArthur Scholarship at the Indiana Center for Global Change and World Peace (1993-94). Grants secured include funding from the Grammy Foundation and the Louisiana Board of Regents. I was honored by a fellowship with the EVIA Digital Archive and a scholarship in residence with UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. My first book, The Amazing Crawfish Boat, is a longitudinal ethnographic study of creativity and tradition within a material folk culture domain. My second book (due out soon) is A Pirate in a Tree: Cultural Memory and Slavery. A third book on How Stories Work is in process.

Courses Taught: Introduction to Folklore (332), Louisiana Folklore (335), Narrative Games (370), Introduction to Text Analytics, America in Legends Online and Off (432), Seminar in Narrative Studies (531), Proseminar in Folklore Theory (632).

Acknowledgements: Education, research, and social change go hand in hand: for too long, too many have been left out. Along with my colleagues, I believe it is important to recognize that UL Lafayette is on the land of the Atakapa-Ishak. We would like to express our gratitude to the First Nations in the Louisiana area, including the Chitimacha, Opelousa, Avogel, Tunica-Biloxi, Jena Choctaw, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and Coushatta. We also recognize that enslaved peoples of African descent worked the land on which the university is situated when it was part of the Mouton plantation. They created the wealth that made the university possible. In 1954, the university was the first in the south to desegregate. This is justifiably a point of pride for the University, but we still have a great deal of work to do in fighting the legacy of racism on our campus, in our state, and in our nation. We seek the full inclusion, protection, and celebration of everyone, especially our LGBTQIA+ students, staff, and colleagues. As a faculty, we are committed to this fight and call upon the University to recognize the urgency of this commitment and to act swiftly in the interest of justice. Everyone deserves equal respect and a sense of belonging in the communities in which they live, learn, and work. UL-Lafayette markets itself on its warm and welcoming community. Each of us is responsible for creating such a community, one for all and for justice.

Recent Publications

Laudun, John and Jonathan Goodwin. 2023. Computing Folklore Studies: Mapping over a Century of Scholarly Production through Topics. Overseas Folkloristics Studies 5. Ed. Li Yang. Tr. Li Yang and Qiao Yingfei. [In production.]

Laudun, John. 2023. Weathering the Storm: Folk Ideas about Character. In Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Shelley Ingram and Willow Mullins. (In production.)

Laudun, John. 2023. Repairing Tradition. Journal of American Folklore 136(541): 274–297.

Laudun, John, Tom Kroh, Mahbube Sidikki, Robert Arp, and Adam Lowther. 2021. The Department of Defense’s Multidomain Operations Challenge. Global Security Review. https://globalsecurityreview.com/defense-department-multidomain-operations-challenge/.

Laudun, John. 2021. The Modes of Vernacular Discourse. Western Folklore 80(3/4): 401–436.

Laudun, John. 2021. Connecting: Folklore Studies and Digital Humanities. In What Folklorists Do, 14-16. Ed. Tim Lloyd. Indiana University Press.

Laudun, John. 2020. The Clown Legend Cascade of 2016. In Folklore and Social Media, 188–208. Eds. Andrew Peck and Trevor Blank. SUNY Press.

Recent Presentations

2024. Mistaken for Narrative: Rethinking the Status of Narrative in Legends and Conspiracy Theories. American Folklore Society (Albuquerque, NM).

2024. Using an LLM to Map the Structure of Conspiracy Theories. College of Liberal Arts Colloquium (Lafayette, LA).

2023. Speaking Subjects, Subjects Spoken: Using TED Talks to Understand Discursive Gender Formations. Text as Data/TADA (Amherst, MA). With Katherine M. Kinnaird and Allison J. B. Chaney.

2023. Folklore’s Nature & Memory’s Coefficient. American Folklore Society (Portland, OR).

2023. Who’s Afraid of ChatGPT: Legends as/and Large Language Models. International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (Sheffield, UK).

2022. Folk Ideas: Folk Discourse as Transport Layer for Ideas. American Folklore Society (Tulsa, OK).

2022. Possibilities for Modeling and Simulation: Microtargeting a Missilleer. Annual conference of Strategic Command (Lawrence Livermore Labs).

Selected Media Appearances

Carpenter, Perry and Mason Amadeus. 2023. Statistically Conscious (Artificial Intelligence). Digital Folklore. November 14. https://digitalfolklore.fm/episodes/s2e6.

Lowther, Adam. 2023. How to Craft Your Narrative of Deterrence. NucleCast: The Official Podcast of the ANWA Deterrence Center. February 3. https://rss.com/podcasts/nuclecast-podcast/847731/.

Wyatt, Megan. 2022. Who do some people put tomatoes in their gumbo? The Daily Advertizer (August 29): 1E, 4E.