The journal was established in 1942 as the
Hoosier Folklore Bulletin and continued in 1945 as
Hoosier Folklore. It was renamed in 1951 as
Midwest Folklore () and continued from 1964 to 1983 under
Richard Dorson as the
Journal of the Folklore Institute (), obtaining its current name in 1984. Since July 2002, the journal has been published and distributed by the Indiana University Press. The journal is run by the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at
Indiana University Bloomington. Following
Richard Dorson, the following persons have been
editors-in-chief of the journal: Mary Ellen Brown,
John Holmes McDowell, Moira Marsh, Judah Cohen,
Jason Baird Jackson,
Michael Foster, and Ray Cashman. ==Abstracting and indexing==