A.B. Lord Fellow, 2014
The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition is pleased to announce the third recipient of the A.B. Lord Fellowship in Oral Tradition, Dr. Sadananda Singh Mayanglambam, who is Assistant Professor of Manipuri and Assistant Coordinator of Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) at Naorem Birahari College in Manipur, India. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Manipuri from Manipur University, India. Dr. Mayanglambam’s research includes epics in folk performative tradition among the Meiteis of Manipur. Wari Leeba performance art is the prominent oral tradition among this group. He continues his academic study in parallel with performing this art form. Since beginning to learn Wari Leeba in 1998, Dr. Mayanglambam became an approved artist of All India Radio, Imphal, Manipur (India) in 2006. To further advance his study, he received the Young Artiste Scholarship in the field of Folk/ Traditional and Indigenous Arts for two years (2007-09) under the Government of India Ministry of Culture’s Scholarship to Young Artistes in Different Cultural Fields. He has conducted more than one thousand performances during the last ten years including a performance at the Estonian Literary Museum for archival documentation in the collection of Estonian Folklore Archives, Tartu, Estonia on June 28, 2011. He was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu, Estonia for ten months during 2010-11 under the Doctoral Studies and Internationalization Program (DoRa-5) of the university. Dr. Mayanglambam’s English publications include: “Wari Leeba: Storytelling Tradition and Cultural Revival Among the Meiteis of Manipur,” Journal of Indian Folkloristics; “Heloi Oknaba: A Study of Supernatural Encounter,” Journal of Social Science, Humanities and Literature; and A Collection of Essays in Manipuri Folklore, (Co ed.) Imphal: Cultural Research Manipur, 2013. For his book Folkloregi Taibangda [Into the World of Folklore], Dr. Mayanglambam received the Dr. Soibam Kumar Literary Award from the Manipuri Sahitya Pracharak Sabha, Wangjing, Manipur in 2014. Dr. Mayanglambam will be in residence at the Center from September through December, 2014. More about Dr. Mayanglambam can be found by viewing his Curriculum Vitae.