Annual Meeting and Programs Director
August 2017–present
Roz has primary responsibility for AFS annual meeting planning and supports AFS Sections and other projects. Roz started at AFS as a Graduate Assistant 2017-18 and has worked almost continuously since then in some capacity on a variety of projects, including the annual meeting, financial record maintenance, and some membership communications. She assumed responsibility for the annual meeting in July 2021.
Roz received her dual BA in Folklore and Gender Studies from Indiana University in 2013, with a minor in French. Her undergraduate training featured a five-month study abroad experience in Aix-en-Provence, France, as well as a summer researching in the renowned Kinsey Institute in Bloomington. She earned her MA in 2015 and her PhD in 2021, both from Indiana University in folklore, specializing in foodways, American and Franco-American regional culture, and community gatherings. As a graduate student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, she taught a variety of undergraduate folklore courses and the folklore-themed section of the required public speaking course for IU’s College of Arts and Sciences, as well as working in the IU Library’s Folklore Collection on the MLA International Bibliography Project, working for Traditional Arts Indiana, and serving as the editor in chief of Trickster Press. Her doctoral minor is in French Linguistics and her dissertation examines the role of communal cooking traditions in expressing and validating group identity among small-town Midwesterners.