Margaret Mills (folklorist)

In 1983, Mills joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty, spending 13 years in the Folklore and Folklife Department. In 1998, Mills joined Ohio State University as Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (1998 to 2003). At OSU she was a faculty associate of the Center for Folklore Studies and the Mershon Center for Strategic Studies, as well as an adjunct professor of anthropology. Mills retired from Ohio State University in June 2012. After having spent most of her career in Pennsylvania and Ohio, with research years in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan, she retired to the Pacific Northwest in June 2012.

After one quarter as a visiting lecturer at the University of Washington in the spring of 1982, Mills became Associate Dean of Students and Dean of Women at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

After graduation, Mills worked for a year as a United States Liaison Officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the University of Mazandaran in Babolsar, Iran. She spent another year as Field Ethnography Consultant for the Denver WIN Field Observation Study. Between May 1980 and April 1982, Mills held a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to prepare her second book manuscript.

Margaret Mills joined the American Folklore Society (AFS) in 1971. Mills served on the AFS Program Committee in 1993 and 2000, on the Long-Range Planning Committee from 1997 to 1999, and on the executive board from 1999 to 2002. In 2012, Mills ran for President of AFS but lost to Michael Ann Williams, Head of the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University.

Margaret Mills graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1968 with a B.A. degree in general studies. She received a PhD (1978) from Harvard University in Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Culture, with Cultural Anthropology. Mills's dissertation, Oral Narrative in Afghanistan: The Individual in Tradition, was directed by Albert Bates Lord, main proponent of the widely influential oral theory of epic composition.

Margaret Ann Mills (born 1946) is an American folklorist, and educator. She is a professor emerita of the Department of Near East Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University.

Margaret Mills was born on November 9, 1946 in Boston, Massachusetts. She was raised in Seattle, Washington, where her Italian-born mother was raised. Although both of her parents were physicians, Mills's interests carried her in a different direction.