Samuel Gordon Armistead was a prominent American ethnographer, linguist, folklorist, Historian, Professor emeritus of Spanish and critic of literature. He is considered one of the most notable Hispanist scholars of the second half of the 20th and early 21st century. His studies were especially focused in the Medieval Spanish language and literature, Hispanic folk literature, comparative literature and folklore. He excelled also in his studies on minority languages and archaic but still existing languages, such as the Spanish language of the Isleño American communities and, especially, the Sephardic Jews language. Armistead was author of a multi-volume series that assembles information concerning the traditional literature of the Sephardic Jews and is author of over twenty books and several hundred articles on Medieval Spanish Literature, Modern Hispanic Oral Literature, and Comparative Literature. His research fields that have had special impact include early poetry, medieval history, Hispanic dialectology, the Spanish epic and Romance old and traditional and he conducted numerous field surveys on the language and oral literature of the Sephardic communities of Morocco and the East as well as in rural communities in Portugal,Spain and Israel, and several sites in the United States.
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