Linda J. Lee is a folklorist, educator, and instructional designer. She’s currently the Director of Instructional Design on the IDEA Courseware Team at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she leads instructional design and training efforts. A folklorist by training, she holds advanced degrees in Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The intersection of fairy tales, popular culture, romance, and gender issues is the core of Linda’s current research. She studies fairy tales and their transformation in popular culture, including the legacy of patriarchy in fairy tales and the representation of monstrosity in contemporary popular culture versions of supernatural bridegroom stories.
Linda was first introduced to the study of Folklore as an undergraduate at Amherst College, where she majored in English and European Studies and graduated summa cum laude. She became committed to the study of folk and fairy tales while working on her honors thesis, which examined Sicilian and Italian stories of fidelity and innocence. She has also researched witchcraft tradition and witch trials. Her M.A. thesis at Berkeley focused on the use of witch iconography in Salem, Massachusetts. And her M.A. thesis at Penn examined post-9/11 airport security rituals.
She has taught humanities, folklore, literature, and writing at several universities in the Philadelphia region, including Temple University, Philadelphia University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She loves upsetting students’ expectations about what literature and folklore are and their relevance to lives today, and challenging students’ assumptions that films, graphic novels, and television are solely for entertainment. She has expertise teaching these subjects to a wide range of students, including traditional undergraduates, adult students, developmental learners, and professionals. She has also been a professional writing tutor.
Prior to beginning graduate studies, she was a professional writer and editor in the high-tech industry. She was Senior Editor of technology trade magazines, including Desktop Publishers Journal and Digital Production Executive, and an Acquisitions and Developmental Editor for Sybex Books. One of her favorite aspects of publishing was helping authors to find their voices. She spent the dot-com boom in various writing and editing capacities in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was a freelance technology writer, an online editor for software developer, and a technical writer for a wealth management firm. She has provided independent editorial and consulting services on a wide range of projects, including academic writing, mathematics textbooks, technical books, public relations materials, and ethnographic reports.
Linda is a voracious reader and fears the day when she must relocate her library. Her favorite authors include Jane Austen, Italo Calvino, Neil Gaiman, and Ellen Kushner. She is a grammar fiend and holds a strong opinion on the proper use of the Oxford comma. She shares her home with three cats, and you can find details of their antics if you follow her on Twitter (@lindajeanlee). She also enjoys gardening, cooking, canning, and knitting.
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