I have signed a contract with Polity to write a major new history of folklore in Europe, entitled A History of Folklore: How the Search for Vernacular Culture made Modern Europe. The book will be a history of the study of vernacular culture in Europe from ancient times to the present day, with a particular focus on how the discipline we call ‘folklore’ developed in the 19th century, and its contribution to the formation of burgeoning national identities. The book will chronicle the discipline of folklore’s subsequent pitfalls and wrong turns, as well as its successes, and look ahead to the future of the discipline – arguing that the best way forward for folklore is to delve deep into its past and recover the approaches of some of the earliest ‘proto-folklorists’.