Scholar & Teacher
Joseph Sobol’s doctoral dissertation on the American storytelling revival was published in 1999 by the University of Illinois Press as the award-winning book, The Storytellers’ Journey: An American Revival. He is a co-founder of the Storytelling in Higher Education Special Interest Group of the National Storytelling Network, and a co-founder and co-editor of the journal Storytelling, Self, Society: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies.
His 2005 book, The House Between Earth and Sky: Harvesting New American
Folktales, from Libraries Unlimited/Teacher Ideas Press, is a step-by-step guide to doing Folklore and Storytelling residencies and instructional units for secondary school ESL classes, as well as a dazzling selection of folktales from around the world as collected by Sobol in the Chicago City Schools.
He is part of an interdisciplinary working group at ETSU that has received a $1.5 million National Cancer Institute grant to interview cancer patients and survivors and weave their stories into instructional modules for medical students and physicians.
He has lectured, keynoted, and concertized across the United States and the British Isles, and in 2009 presented along with a select group of scholars at the first International Storytelling Conference in the Kingdom of Bhutan.
