Interview with Nat Ivy, Folklife Specialist at the Regional Folklife Center at the Arts Institute of Middlesex County, and former Oregon Folklife Network graduate employee.
Interviewed by Oliver Hillenkamp, current UO Folklore and Public Culture masters student.
OH: Please talk a bit about your time at the University of Oregon Folklore program and working as a graduate student employee with the Oregon Folklife Network. What were some of your favorite aspects of the program and of your job at OFN, and / or some challenges you encountered?
NI: I went to UO from 2023 to 2025, so I graduated this past June, and I did my thesis on 19th century Appalachian murder ballads. I worked at OFN my first year, and then helped out during my second year with RAG (Roster Artists Gathering, now called the Culture Keeper Gathering) because it was the second time it was ever happening.
I think my favorite parts about OFN were definitely getting to shape RAG for the first year that it happened. It really helped prepare me for going out and getting an actual folklife job – knowing how to talk to people, knowing how to talk to artists about their work and how they connect with others, and just kind of getting out of an academic view of folklore. It’s really easy, especially when you’re in a grad program, to be so specialized, and so, like, in on your thing. And because my thing was all full of dead people, you can’t really do any ethnography with that. You can’t really practice fieldwork, it’s all retroactive, looking at archives and transcripts and everything. So working with OFN was just a really good opportunity to talk to actual people and find out whether or not it was the right career path for me to try to pursue something academically versus publicly, and going with public folklore was definitely really fulfilling.
OH: What was it like looking for a job after graduating from the MA? What did you learn about job opportunities relating to Folklore degrees?
NI: Public History Jobs? Their job board? Fantastic. I would highly recommend it to everybody.
I didn’t have an offer for a job until the month after I graduated. So I took a contract position working as a historian in West Virginia with their Parks and Recreation. I did that in the interim before starting this position, so I didn’t go straight here. I think that was still cool and interesting and good for me. But yeah, it wasn’t a direct straight shot. Though it was still in my general realm and scope because history and folklore are related.
OH: Talk about your current job at the Regional Folklife Center at the Arts Institute of Middlesex County.
NI: I am a folklife specialist, which is pretty cool. Very, very, very pumped to be working directly in Folklife. Right now, I’m working on some grant applications for funding, and then also looking into the current programming and seeing how Folklife intersects with their Living History Center and other programming around the county, and seeing how, as a regional folklife center, to best support people within this county and all of Central Jersey. So I’m still on a very long learning curve because I’m not from here, so I’m trying to learn everything I can about the history and culture and arts.
OH: Is there anything else you would like to share with the blog?
NI: Go out and visit your local history sites. It’s really fun. If you haven’t gone to, like, the Exploding Whale Memorial Park, just go, you know? There’s some folklife stuff out there that you probably don’t interact with all the time because it’s the background of your life, but it’s really interesting when you think about it through this other lens, and just get to enjoy the space that you’re in currently.
Check out the website for the Regional Folklife Center at the Arts Institute of Middlesex County here: https://middlesexcountyculture.com/categories/folklife/