page_title: Jan Harold Brunvand
section_title: Post-retirement career
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Harold Brunvand / Biography / Post-retirement career
caption_attribution_description: English: Jan Harold Brunvand, American folklorist, best known for his work with urban legends, at his 75th birthday party. "I am wearing a fly fishing bow tie and a fish pin on my lapel, and I am trying on ski goggles that were a gift from a friend that evening."
context_page_description: Jan Harold Brunvand is a retired American folklorist, researcher, writer, public speaker, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah.
  Brunvand is best known for popularizing the concept of the urban legend, a form of modern folklore or story telling. Urban Legends are "too good to be true" stories that travel by word of mouth, by print or the internet and are attributed to an FOAF: friend of a friend. "Urban Legends," Brunvand says, "have a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible and they have a moral."
  Though criticized for the "popular" rather than "academic" orientation of his book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker and others, Brunvand felt that it was a "natural and worthwhile part of his job as a folklorist to communicate the results of his research to the public."
  For his lifetime dedication to the field of folklore, which included radio and television appearances, a syndicated newspaper column, and over 100 publications, Brunvand is considered to be "the legend scholar with the greatest influence on twentieth-century media."
context_section_description: Brunvand retired from the University of Utah in 1996, but continued doing some research and writing as professor emeritus of English.
  Brunvand was a guest on National Public Radio's All Things Considered in September 1999. He spoke Noah Adams about his book Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends.
  His Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, illustrated by Randy Hickman, was published by ABC-CLIO in 2001.
  He gave the keynote address at the 2003 meeting of the Missouri Folklore Society. He was a speaker at the World Skeptics Congress in Italy in 2004. His is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. In 2003 Brunvand was awarded CSICOP's Distinguished Skeptic Award.
  Brunvand's book Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends was published in 2004 by W.W. Norton and Company.
caption: Jan Harold Brunvand trying on a pair of ski goggles on his 75th birthday
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