Teaching Faculty IV
Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ | College of Letters & Science
Hometown: Delavan, WI
Lowell Brower is a fourth-generation Wisconsinite, a former werewolf hunter, the father of a Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw champion, and a current member of the Teaching Faculty in UW-Madison’s Folklore Program, where he teaches classes on supernatural storytelling, internet culture, campus traditions, migration narratives, and ‘the folklore of emergency.’ Lowell has conducted long-term fieldwork in communities throughout Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Upper Midwest, focusing on verbal traditions, vernacular memory, and the politics of storytelling amid conflict. Lowell’s other research interests include Upper Midwestern culture, contemporary legends & conspiracy theories, fandoms, cryptids, and the weaponization of folklore in digital spaces. Lowell earned a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and a B.A. in English, and African Languages and Literature from UW-Madison.
Talks can also be offered in Swahili.
Talks:
Wisconsin Whoppers: Sensationalistic Storytelling, Tall Tale Tourism, and Cryptid Currency in the Badger State and Beyond
From ‘fish tales’ to hodag hunts, Wisconsin’s folkloric history is rife with self-aggrandizing legendary, self-deprecatory humor, and self-conscious fabulation. Reveling in upper-midwestern folk humor, the capitalizing on the ostensive potentials of exaggeratory legend-telling — combining the arts of master tale-tellers, carnival barkers, and down-home humorists — local municipalities, businesses, institutions, advertisers, and individual storytellers have marshalled the folkloric arts throughout Wisconsin’s history, in service of drawing attention, money, tourism, and notoriety to themselves, their products, and their discourses. And through these engaging, enticing, and often otherworldly stories, they’ve shaped both insider and outsider perspectives about what it means to be a Badger!
Operating from the premise that legends and tall tales can’t help but reveal the values, worldviews, fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams, and capabilities of their transmitters, we’ll spend some time thinking about what the stories we tell can tell us about who we are.
Memes to Live (and/or Die) By: The Glories and Dangers of Digital Folklore in a Polarized World
That conspiracy theory you read while scrolling through your Facebook feed last night…that subversive meme just posted to X…that contemporary legend circulating on the creepypasta Wiki…that TikTok dance craze you just tried…that infuriating “fake news” that your local politician keeps repeating…that 4-Chan board that you wish you hadn’t read…your frenemy’s latest Instagram post: all of these and more comprise the our surprisingly consequential objects of study in this talk. Exploring the wild world-wide-web of “informal vernacular culture” being created, transmitted, and adapted by online communities of 21st century folk, we’ll think through the powers, potentials, and peculiarities of online storytelling in relationship to community-building, political engagement, social change, memetic warfare, and everyday negotiations of individual and group identity. What are the continuities and disjunctures between hypermodern online culture and ancient storytelling traditions, folkloric motifs, and pre-internet ways of knowing, being, and interacting. What new folk groups, storytelling genres, intersubjective possibilities, and political potentialities are arising as a result of online engagement? What new forms of belonging, exclusion, connection, and violence are emerging through online architectures? How are online traditions being harnessed, weaponized, and manipulated to change the world? What are the powers and potentials of internet folklore in our increasingly polarized world?