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.
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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.
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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 Bhuta​​​​n.