Rediscovering the Legacy of Czech Emigré and scholar Svatava Pírková Jakobson (1908-2000)

FAIN: FT-230017-15

Lida Cope
East Carolina University (Greenville, NC 27858-5235)

Summer research and writing on Folklore and Folklife, Immigration History and Linguistics.

The project focuses on an extraordinary but today virtually forgotten émigré Czech female scholar, Svatava Pírková Jakobson (1908-2000). It will bring to light never-published results of her folkloric and sociolinguistic fieldwork on Czech and Slovak immigrant populations in the U.S. spanning five decades (1940s-the late 1980s). Under the Stipend's tenure, I will prepare (1) a portrait of this female researcher and her scholarly undertakings; and (2) a first ethnolinguistic analysis of her early fieldwork in New York City unified through a "musical survey" she published between 1944 and 1945 in Nedelní new yorské listy ("The Sunday New York Gazette"), a supplement of New yorské listy ("The New York Gazette"), the longest-lived ethnic Czech newspaper in NYC. These articles will form the first two chapters of a book on Jakobson's ethnolinguistic and folkloric journey with ethnic Czechs and Slovaks in the U.S. and strengthen my book proposal for publication.