Kelly Feltault

I earned a Master's degree in Public Folklore and Oral History at UNC Chapel Hill in 1997 after living in Hungary from 1990 through 1992, a time of exciting and profound change for the country. I became interested in how individuals and communities negotiated their identity during drastic political, and thus social and cultural, change while I was in Hungary and returned there to conduct my thesis research in 1995. My thesis focused on the life story of Judit Barcza Benedek, a Hungarian gentry woman, and the social poetic construction of her class and gender identity through family heirlooms during the brutal Rakosi regime and the transformation of that identity and its construction when she fled Hungary in 1956 and settled in New Jersey. The work also addresses current issues in 'writing culture,' as Judit and I collaborated on the writing of the thesis and the final chapter is our discussion of this negotiation process in fieldwork.

In the final year of graduate school at UNC, I began a consulting business, Cultural Crossings, and worked on several community development and documentation projects for the state of North Carolina prior to graduating. In the summer of 1997, I was hired as the primary fieldworker for the Delmarva Folklife Project, a regional cultural conservation and economic development project located on the Delmarva Peninsula funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the states of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. This project lasted two years, during which time I worked with watermen, hunters and trappers, women's social organizations, church groups, seafood processors and traditional crafts people. The project resulted in infrastructure and policies to support local, traditional culture in the face of growing urbanization.

The Delmarva Project led to my work as the Project Director for the Crab Pickers Oral History Project at the Center for Chesapeake Studies. This project set the course for my current and future research working with occupational groups facing globalization issues in the US. This three-year project documented the cultural and economic history of the crab picking industry of the Eastern Shore of Maryland through oral histories, documentary photography, fieldwork in the remaining picking houses and archival research. I undertook the work at a time when the industry was predicting its own demise due to a shortage of crabs, increased imports of crab meat from Asia, and the dwindling number of local crab pickers. During the project, the Maryland state legislature put forward a bill to require label laws requiring packers to state where crab meat was picked and packed, and the industry association petitioned the Clinton government to place tariffs on the Asian imported meat. The crab pickers and I collaborated to produce a book, It's how you pick the crab: An Oral Portrait of the Crab Picking Industry of the Eastern Shore. The community wished to produce something that would give them voice.

This expanded my interest in public policy, and in 2001 I brought my ethnographic and program analysis skills to the international development field as the Sr. Program Officer for Investing in Women in Development, a USAID-funded program that integrates gender into international development projects. I began the PhD program in anthropology at American University in 2003, under a new program entitled Race, Gender, and Social Justice. I plan to return to my earlier research with the crab pickers of the Eastern Shore, focusing on gender, labor, trade and globalization in the context of the Blue Revolution and the export of the crab picking industry from Maryland to Asia.

Other projects include fieldwork among East European communities and factory owners for the Cultural Thread exhibit on commercial lace making in New Jersey, and as the Project Manager for the Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis Symposium at the Library of Congress in 2000.