Gillian Bennett

Gillian Bennett (born 1939) is a folklorist, most notable for her work on contemporary legends. Education Bennett enrolled as a mature graduate student at the University of Sheffield in 1978, where she studied at the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language (CECTAL) under the supervision of J. D. A. Widdowson.  She gained both masters and doctoral degrees, and would retain ties to CECTAL as an honorary research associate. Bennett's PhD thesis was titled Aspects of supernatural belief, memorate and legend in a contemporary urban environment and "aimed to move away from the antiquarian bias of previous work on the folklore of the supernatural in order to shed light on present day attitudes and concepts". Contemporary legend research In 1982 CECTAL hosted a conference on Contemporary Legend.  This initiated a number of succeeding conferences on the topic, leading to the creation in 1988 of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR).