Suzanne Petersen

Suzanne Petersen, Associate Professor of Spanish, completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1976. Her primary research interests include the Pan-Hispanic Traditional Ballad (Romancero) and the poetics of orally transmitted poetry. She has used computers since the early seventies to edit and analyse portions of this vast body of poetry and is currently in the process of publishing on-line her latest work in this area: an updated Bibliography of the Pan-Hispanic Romancero as well as a textual database that initially includes over 9000 versions of romances collected from around the world from the 15th century to the present and an audio archive of recordings of some 380 ballad versions collected in the field since 1950. The bibliography, text, and music archives, all regularly updated, are currently available on-line at http://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/. Those who publish in the area of Hispanic and Pan-European Balladry are invited to submit descriptions of their publications directly from the project web site (http://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/biblio/index.php). Professor Petersen is currently working to achieve better representation for the Portuguese and Catalan traditions in the ballad archive and to implement interactive querying capabilities that will perform statistical analysis of primary and secondary ballad data and provide cartographic display of their results.