Online Talk: Early findings from The National Folklore Survey for England

The recent revival of popular interest in folklore, from calendar customs to folk horror media, demonstrates that individual and community identities are interwoven with the perceived concept of Englishness, expressed throughout mainstream media, social media platforms and podcasts.

However, diversity of the content and the wider cultural context have yet to be captured or understood within the multiple identities that make up multicultural Englishness today. The National Folklore Survey aims to capture an accurate snapshot of the folklore of multicultural England, producing new knowledge, insights and understanding of contemporary English folk culture at a time when many individuals and communities in England feel what historian and broadcaster David Olusoga calls ‘a conflicted sense of identity’.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is now in its second year, and the team, based between Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Hertfordshire, and Chapman University (USA), is currently analysing the results of the Survey, conducted by Ipsos in summer 2025 with just under 2000 people across England. This talk, by project lead, Dr David Clarke, co-lead, Dr Diane A. Rodgers, and Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr Sophie Parkes-Nield, gives an overview of the project and reveals some of its early findings. nationalfolkloresurvey.co.uk

Speakers: Dr David Clarke is one of Britain’s leading authorities on folklore and contemporary legend. He is Project Lead for the AHRC-funded National Folklore Survey for England and from 2008-13 acted as consultant for The National Archives during the release of the Ministry of Defence’s archive on UFOs (often referred to as ‘Britain’s Real X-Files’). He is an experienced journalist and broadcaster and has appeared in and acted as consultant for numerous radio and television programmes including BBC Timewatch and Netflix Encounters. He is the author of seven books including The Angels of Mons (2004), How UFOs Conquered the World (2015), UFO Drawings from The National Archives (2017) and Space Age Folklore (forthcoming 2026). In 2018, he co-founded the Centre for Contemporary Legend research group at Sheffield Hallam University with Dr Diane Rodgers and Andrew

Robinson.

Dr Sophie Parkes-Nield is a morris dancer, a folklore researcher and, writing as Sophie Parkes, a writer of novels, short fiction, life writing, and music journalism. She completed a PhD in creative writing and folklore at Sheffield Hallam University in 2024 with a practice-based thesis in which she interrogated the representation of the calendar custom in the contemporary novel. A book on the topic is under contract with University of Exeter Press. Sophie is the postdoctoral researcher on the National Folklore Survey for England project, and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Leeds Arts University.

Dr Diane A. Rodgers is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication and Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). She co-founded the Centre for Contemporary Legend Research Group (CCL) and is President-elect of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR). Alongside acting as Co-Investigator on the AHRC National Folklore Survey for England, she was recently a Co-Investigator on the AHRC Curiosity project, ‘Dracula Returns to Derby’. In 2022, she completed her doctorate with a thesis titled Wyrd TV: Folklore, folk horror and hauntology in British 1970s Television. She has recently published chapters in The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2024), Folk Horror on Film (2024) and Nigel Kneale and Horror (2025). She has recent articles in the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Folklore, and is about to publish her first monograph Wyrd TV with BFI Publishing.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code–log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/early-findings-from-the-national-folklore-survey-for-england-tickets-1980381952731?aff=ebdsoporgprofile. 

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