Sheila Bock is Associate Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her academic training is in Folklore Studies, an interdisciplinary field that integrates methods from the humanities and the social sciences to examine vernacular beliefs and practices, the dynamics of tradition, and the aesthetics of daily life. Her research interests include narrative responses to stigmatization, contested domains of illness experience, and material/digital/embodied performances of personal and community identities. She is author of numerous articles and book chapters and the forthcoming book Claiming Space: Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards (University Press of Colorado, 2023). An award winning teacher, she also serves as co-editor of the journal Narrative Culture.