Professor Langston Winterhall

Professor Langston Winterhall has rapidly emerged as one of the most respected voices in folkloric studies. With a background that spans prestigious academic institutions and field research across Europe and the Arctic North, he brings a rare combination of scholarly rigor and fieldwork intuition to his research.

He studied myth and cultural folk tales in England, earning both his undergraduate and master’s degrees with a focus on narrative transformation in isolated communities. He completed his Ph.D. in Folklore and Mysticism in Germany, where his dissertation on “The Ritual Power of Repetition in Cold Climate Traditions” drew critical acclaim.

His early professional career included work with multiple museums and cultural archives, most notably a three-year term at the Smithsonian, where he served as a reference librarian and cultural research fellow. His fieldwork eventually led him to the Icelandic Cultural Commission, where he spearheaded efforts to catalogue oral traditions for a proposed (but still unrealized) National Folk Cultural Museum.

Currently Professor Winterhall is dividing his time between the research arm of the Mendtide Main Library (funded by The Doc) and the North Pole Historical Society.