Open Access Resources for Fairy Tale Research
- Cramer & Del George
- Jun 14
- 3 min read
Pauline Greenhill (she/her) is a Canadian academic with an MA in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador and a PhD in Folklore and Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba. She enjoys collaborating with international colleagues and students (it’s less lonely!), and has recently sought to ensure that her academic work on fairy-tale media is available free and Open Access.
Open Access Resources for Research on Fairy Tales and Fairy-Tale Media
The advantages of Open Access are pretty obvious. You get stuff for free, but also you can be pretty sure it’s legitimate (unlike a lot of material on the internet). Open Access helps more than just academics. It makes reliable information available to the general public who may be very interested in what we are doing at colleges and universities, and will benefit from being able to find out easily and without cost. And Open Access also furthers a culture of a shared community of individuals and groups who value cooperation, collaboration, thoughtful reflection, accountability, inclusiveness, and public service for people and the earth.
And so, in that spirit I’d like to offer some Open Access resources to help you learn about fairy tales and fairy-tale media. For funding my own Open Access material below, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; University of Jyväskylä Open Research Centre, Finland; University of Winnipeg; and Utah State University Press. I’m also suggesting some good free resources that I’ve curated for quality. Enjoy!
Publications:
Anjirbag, Michelle Anya. 2018. “Mulan and Moana: Embedded Coloniality and the Search for Authenticity in Disney Animated Film.” Social Sciences 7 (11): 230. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7110230
Bacchilega, Cristina and Pauline Greenhill. 2025. Justice in 21st Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder. Bloomsbury Academic. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350348295
Best, Anita, Martin Lovelace, and Pauline Greenhill. 2019. Clever Maids, Fearless Jacks, and a Cat: Fairy Tales from a Living Oral Tradition. Utah State UP. https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/3714-clever-maids-fearless-jacks-and-a-cat
Dundes, Lauren, ed. 2018. “Special Issue: The Psychosocial Implications of Disney Movies.” Social Sciences.” Social Sciences 7 (11). https://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci/special_issues/Disney_Movies_Psychosocial_Implications
Greenhill, Pauline and Diane Tye, eds. 2014. Unsettling Assumptions: Tradition, Gender, Drag. Utah State UP. https://www.upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/2348-unsettling-assumptions
Greenhill, Pauline and Sidney Eve Matrix, eds. 2010. Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity. Utah State UP. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/70/
Greenhill, Pauline and Steven Kohm. 2020. “‘Hansel and Gretel’ Films: Crimes, Harms, and Children.” Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura 2 (1): 11–34. https://www.journals.polon.uw.edu.pl/index.php/dlk/article/view/350
Greenhill, Pauline. 2014. “Wanting (To Be) Animal: Fairy-Tale Transbiology in The StoryTeller.” Feral Feminisms 2: 29-45. http://feralfeminisms.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ff_Wanting-To-Be-Animal_Issue2.pdf
Jorgensen, Jeana and Brittany Warman. 2014. “Molding Messages: Analyzing the Reworking of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics and Dollhouse.” In Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy, 144-162. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/699
Kosonen, Heidi S. and Pauline Greenhill. 2022. “‘Something’s Not Right in Silverhöjd’: Nordic Supernatural and Environmental and Species Justice in Jordskott.” Folklore 133 (3): 334-356. 10.1080/0015587X.2022.2044598
Lamari, Lou and Pauline Greenhill. 2021. “Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television.” Open Cultural Studies 5 (1): 169–80. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2020-0127/html
Nguyen, Mai and Pauline Greenhill. 2022. “Uncanny sounds and the politics of wonder in Christian Petzold’s ‘Undine.’” NECSUS Spring 2022_#Rumors. https://necsus-ejms.org/uncanny-sounds-and-the-politics-of-wonder-in-christian-petzolds-undine/
Schwabe, Claudia, ed. 2016. “Special Issue: The Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture.” Humanities 5 (4). https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/fairy_tales
Sherman, Sharon R. and Mikel J. Koven, eds. 2007. Folklore / Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture. Utah State UP. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/34/
Uther, Hans-Jörg. 2004/2011. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography (3 vols). Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. https://edition.fi/kalevalaseura/catalog/book/763
Websites and Blogs:
ATU-AT-Motif: Tales of Magic 300 – 559. https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/c.php?g=1039894&p=7610331
Australian Fairy Tale Society, Once upon a time... https://australianfairytalesociety.org/blog/
Breezes from Wonderland. https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/tatar/
Fabulando: Enciclopedia Multimediale Delle Fiabe. http://www.fairitaly.eu/joomla/en/
Fairy Tale Films Research. https://www.facebook.com/groups/fairy.tales.films.research/
Folklinks: Folk and Fairy-Tale Sites. https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/folklinks.html
FTTV: Analyzing Fairy Tales on Television. http://fttv.byu.edu
International Fairy-Tale Filmography. http://iftf.uwinnipeg.ca/
Multilingual Folk Tale Database. http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=home
Once Upon A Blog. https://fairytalenewsblog.blogspot.com/
Through the Twisted Woods. https://throughthetwistedwoods.wordpress.com/
Writing In Margins. https://writinginmargins.weebly.com/
Happy searching and good luck with your research! And if you find more good online material yourself and would like to suggest it, or if you have questions, please e mail me at p.greenhill@uwinnipeg.ca