A Conversation with Timothy Lloyd

Abstract The period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s brought enormous growth in academic folklore, as well as a maturation of the applied dimension of our profession. In the past decade, the field has witnessed a significant number of retirements of folklorists who came of age during these heady days. We offer this oral history interview as a way of recognizing the contributions of retiring AFS Executive Director Tim Lloyd. In the past decade, the AFS annual meeting has included public interviews with leaders in our field as part of the larger “Collecting Voices” oral history project housed at Utah State University. Lloyd was interviewed by JAF co-editor Michael Ann Williams on October 19, 2017, at the American Folklore Society meeting in Minneapolis. This interview has been edited by Tim Lloyd for clarity from a verbatim transcript prepared by JAF editorial assistant Susanna Pyatt from an audio recording. The original audio and video recordings are available at USU. In this interview, Lloyd discusses the factors that enticed him into the field of folklore, the paths that took him into a career in both public and private nonprofit agencies, and the role he eventually assumed as the American Folklore Society’s first full-time executive director.