Folklorist Mary Hufford researches, writes, and teaches about environmental knowledge, both place-based and scientific.  For four decades, her work has engaged government agencies, academic programs, and non-profit organizations with communities in urban and rural areas. As folklife specialist for the Library of Congress, she directed interdisciplinary field research projects in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the Appalachian coalfields. As director of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, she conducted place-based ethnographic research with students and colleagues in Ohio’s chemical valley and in Philadelphia neighborhoods. Since 2015, she has directed the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network’s program, “Stories of Place,” a program attentive to how Appalachian communities in Eastern Kentucky, Southeastern Ohio, and Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley study, steward, and celebrate headwaters woodlands and waterways.  As part of that program, in cooperation with Mid-Atlantic Arts, she directed a team survey of Central Appalachian Folk and Traditional Arts. A Guggenheim fellow, she has taught at UC Berkeley, Goucher College, and most recently the Ohio State University.  Her books, articles, and monographs include Chaseworld: Foxhunting and Storytelling in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage, Waging Democracy in the Kingdom of Coal, and Piecing Together the Fragments. To view her downloadable publications, visit https://osu.academia.edu/MaryHufford. She lives and gardens with her husband, Steve Oaks, on a forest farm in Beverly, WV.