Tristram P. Coffin

During his career he was also a guest professor at UCLA, the University of Rhode Island, Providence College, and in 1962 and 1963 was a Visiting Professor of Literature at the US Military Academy at West Point, one of the first civilians to lecture there. Upon retirement, he became a Lecturer in Folklore at Providence College and at the University of Rhode Island.

In 1959 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where he taught until his retirement. With MacEdward Leach, he co-founded the Department of Folklore at Penn, and was a full professor in both the English and Folklore departments, as well as Vice-Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Coffin was a former Secretary-Treasurer of the American Folklore Society, as well as Editor of their Memoir and their Bibliographical Series and was elected a Fellow of that group. A 1953 Guggenheim Fellow, he was the 20th century's top scholar of ballad texts, is listed in the Who's Who in America Millennium Edition, and was highly regarded internationally.

Coffin was a past Associate Professor of English at Granville, Ohio's Denison University, where he taught and coached (tennis and soccer) for nine years (1949–58). He was elected to the Denison University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1986 and the Tristram P. Coffin Scholarship was established in his and his wife Ruth Anne's honor in 1994 by William G. Bowen of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Coming to Rhode Island after his father died of influenza in 1927, he was educated at the Providence Country Day School, Moses Brown School (1939) in Providence, and then Haverford College (1943) outside of Philadelphia. After three years in the United States Army Air Corps and the Signal Corps during World War II, he completed an MA and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Tristram Potter Coffin (February 13, 1922 – January 31, 2012) was an American folklorist and leading scholar of ballad texts in the 20th century. Coffin spent the bulk of his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of English and a co-founder of the Folklore Department. He was the author of 20 books and more than 100 scholarly articles and reviews.

Coffin was born February 13, 1922 in San Marino, California, the son of Tristram Roberts Coffin, an investment banker formerly of Richmond, Indiana and New York City, and Elsie Potter Robinson of Edgewood Farm, Wakefield, Rhode Island. He had an older sister, Trelsie Coffin Buffum Lucas (1918–1987); an older brother, Roberts Robinson Coffin, who died shortly after birth in 1920; and a younger brother, Peter Robinson Coffin (1923–1998), who was a college professor as well. He also had an older half-sister, Lydia, and half-brother, Richard, from his father's first marriage.

In 1944, he married Ruth Anne ("Rusty") Hendrickson (May 28, 1922 – August 5, 2011), a Columbus, Ohio native and school administrator, who attended the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia and Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. They had four children, eleven grandchildren, and many dogs.

Through his father, he is a direct descendant of Tristram Coffin, one of the original permanent settlers on Nantucket Island in 1660.