Hasan M. El-Shamy

Hasan M. El-Shamy was born on 21 June 1938 in Cairo, Egypt, and was schooled there. He studied at Ain Shams University, graduating with honours in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1959, and then completed a year of graduate work in psychology and education at Ain Shams in 1959 and 1960.

A Fulbright Fellowship then allowed him to begin graduate studies in folklore at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1960. He received his master's degree in folklore in 1964 and his doctorate in 1967, with interdisciplinary training in folklore, psychology and anthropology. His dissertation rethought folklore in terms of social learning theory and examined the experiences of Egyptian immigrants in New York.

El-Shamy taught sociology and anthropology as an assistant professor at Morehead State University in 1967 and 1968. He then became director of the archives at the Folklore Center of the Ministry of Culture in Cairo, a post he held until 1972, while also serving as an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the American University in Cairo.

In 1972 he returned to Indiana University as a member of the Folklore Institute, now the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Over 41 years he taught, researched and served as director of graduate studies for the folklore program, and was also affiliated with the African Studies Program and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He held visiting posts including a visiting professorship at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, in 2002 and at Tanta University in Egypt in 2003. He became professor emeritus in 2013.

His Folktales of Egypt (1980), based on extensive fieldwork, won the Chicago Folklore Prize. His later books included Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification (1995), Tales Arab Women Tell and the Behavioral Patterns They Portray (1999), Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index (2004), A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights (2006) and Religion Among the Folk in Egypt (2008). He also co-edited Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature (2005) with Jane Garry.

His work introduced the approach he called folkloric behavior, treating folklore as learned behavior, and the concept of the brother-sister syndrome in Arab family life. His honours included the Senior Scholar Award of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (2002), two Fulbright fellowships, election as a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 2006, and being named the 94th Great China Lecturer in 2011.

El-Shamy lived in Bloomington, Indiana, for most of his adult life. He was married to Susan, and they had two daughters, Jenny and Lyla. He also had two grandchildren, Nadia and Ben. His Indiana University colleagues remembered him around Bloomington as a loving husband, a proud father and a doting grandfather.

Hasan M. El-Shamy died peacefully on 16 August 2026 in Bloomington, Indiana, at the age of 88. No cause of death was made public.

His death was announced by Indiana University's Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, which shared a scholarly memorial written by his colleague Jason Baird Jackson, and by the American Folklore Society. The department said a full obituary and details of a service in his honour would be shared later.

El-Shamy was connected with Indiana University as a student, alumnus or faculty member for 66 years. His tale-type and motif indexes for the Arab world and for The Thousand and One Nights are standard tools for comparative folk narrative research, and his Folktales of Egypt remains a key collection of Egyptian oral tradition.

Colleagues described him as an heir to the international tradition of folklore study established at Indiana by Stith Thompson, and as a remarkable ambassador for the field and the university. His death came as the department began marking the centenary of its first graduate degree in folklore studies.