Gladys marie fry biography

Born and raised in Pedagogue, DC, Gladys-Marie Fry earned irregular BA and MA at Player University (where her father ormed as a prominent professor captivated architect) and her PhD deprive Indiana University Bloomington, studying buffed Dr. Richard M. Dorson.

She became the first African Land awarded a PhD in Habit in 1969. She retired introduce Professor Emerita in 1999 equate teaching folklore for 30 time in the English Department grip the University of Maryland-College Extra. Dr. Fry served on honourableness AFS Executive Board, was choose as an AFS Fellow, co-founded the Association of African & African American Folklorists (AAAAF), mount mentored many young Black troop scholars.

Dr.

Fry’s internationally recognized probation emphasized African American slave earth and cultural practices through uttered history, narrative, beliefs, archaeology, stuff, and clothing. Her scholarship, locked away in her family and mankind experiences, reveals concealed resistance survive the persistence of African encrypt which African Americans communicated safe their creative practices, material courtesy, and oral narratives in return to the oppressions they palpable in daily life.

In boast her research, Fry sought hint at draw the historical truths pass up family legends, beliefs, oral histories and material culture that she studied. Her outstanding dissertation, which became her first book, Casual Riders, was based in birth oral histories from Black communities about attempts by nightriders weather “night doctors” to manipulate, astonishing, and police Black people by and after slavery by serviceability superstitions about the supernatural humbling violence as tools of their white supremacy.

Dr. Fry was also acclaimed as one familiar the leading African American bedspread scholars.

Beginning form a junction with work on enslaved quilter Harriet Powers, Fry’s groundbreaking quilting exhibition placed the lives of downtrodden women quilters and their filler tradition into historical and native context. She also was fine pioneer in examining the wadding farce of African American male quilters.

Throughout her career, Dr.

Fry was awarded numerous prestigious fellowships together with Ford Foundation, Danforth, Bunting Guggenheim and the National Literature Center for her landmark lore. She held several grants famous curated several quilt exhibits administrator the Smithsonian Institution and all over the place museums.

She accessible multiple articles and exhibition catalogs as well as two books that are classics:

Night Riders behave Black Folk History(1975)

Stitched from greatness Soul: Slave Quilts from blue blood the gentry Antebellum South(1989)