Hauntings: English Folk and Its Ancestors

Part of What the Folk? Fest from Saturday 13 – Sunday 21 June 2026.

Folklore in England has tended to mean something quite particular: rural, white, ancestral, rooted in a deep past most people can no longer reach. Folk in many other places has meant something else entirely.

In North America, the Caribbean, South Asia, folklore is a living, urban, plural set of practices that people make and remake in the cities they live in. Why is English folk an outlier?

This talk traces the answer back to the Victorians, who built English folk around survival, prehistory and pagan ancestry, and asks whether folk in a borough like Hackney (urban, diverse, alive) might offer a way of rejoining the international conversation about what folk is and who it belongs to.

About Matthew Cheeseman

Matthew Cheeseman is Professor of Writing and Folklore at the University of Derby. He sits on the Council of the Folklore Society and was Principal Investigator of Folklore Without Borders, an AHRC-funded international research network on equality, diversity and inclusion in UK folklore. His research focuses on English folk practice and its relationship to nationalism and indigeneity. He is co-editor of Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland (Routledge, 2022) and a recent chapter on English nationalism, folklore and indigeneity appears in the Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2023).

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