Teacher, bibliographer, and pioneering student of Latin American folklore and folkloristics. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Boggs became interested in folklore at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Archer Taylor and earned his Ph.D. in Spanish in 1930. His dissertation on the folktales of Spain was published in Folklore Fellows Communications the same year. He had particularly strong ties with the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where he taught from 1929 until 1950 when he accepted a post at the University of Miami. During his first year in Chapel Hill, he introduced the first folklore course taught at the university. In the 1930s, he began to forge ties with faculty members who shared his folkloric interests—Guy Benton Johnson (sociology), Arthur Palmer Hudson (English), Frederick Koch (drama), Urban Tigner Holmes (romance languages), Jan P.Schinhan (music), and Richard Jente (German). By 1940 Boggs had established the university’s curriculum in folklore, the first folklore graduate program in the United States. His outreach continued at the University of Miami, where Boggs taught from 1950 until his retirement in 1967. There he developed extensive contacts with Latin American folklorists. He served as director of the Hispanic American Institute and developed that into the university’s International Center. Boggs founded the periodical Folklore Americas and the journal North Carolina Folklore, and he was the author of 150 books and articles on folklore and Spanish literature. When Southern Folklore Quarterly began publication in 1937, he was asked to compile an annual bibliography of publications on folklore, a task that he continued for twenty-two years. Boggs and his wife, Edna Garrido de Boggs, herself the author of studies of Dominican folklore, remained professionally active long after his retirement. They donated to the UNC library his books, recordings, and most notably his seventysix volumes of Biographic Documentation that include correspondence with leading folklorists in the United States, Europe, and especially Latin America. Beverly Patterson
References
Boggs, Ralph Steele. 1981. Reminiscences on the Prenatal Care and Birth of the Curriculum. Newsletter, Curricu-lum in Folklore. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pp. 1–3. (Patterson, Daniel W.) 1990. Boggs Donates Recordings and Papers. Newsletter, Curriculum in Folklore. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, p. 1.