Professor Dan Ben-Amos says he lives a "common" life.
But common by whose standards?
He's conducted field studies of folklore in Africa and has served in the Israeli army as a bodyguard for David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister.
And, recently, a book he edited won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award Sephardic Culture Category - a nationally-acclaimed award administered by The Jewish Book Council that recognizes achievements in Jewish literature.
Folktales of the Jews: Volume I: Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion, which was also selected as a finalist in the Scholarship category, is the first of a planned five- or six-book series of Jewish folklore.
"What is interesting for me in folklore is that [it] is all tradition - this is communication that is not censored," he said.
Ben-Amos, a professor in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department, began his studies as a student of English and Jewish literature in Jerusalem's Hebrew University.
From there, he went on to earn a Ph.D. at Indiana University, which had one of the only folklore departments at the time.
In 1967, he came to Penn, where he currently teaches undergraduate courses in folklore.
Ben-Amos was approached by the Jewish Publication Society, a Philadelphia-based publishing company, to ask if he would compile the book that would ultimately bring him the prestigious award.
"I thought that I would be able to finish it on the side, . within a year or two," Ben-Amos said. But, "it became an all-absorbing work," he said of the Sephardic - a Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish ethnic group - folklore project.
Ben-Amos used the Israel Folktale Archives, founded by Ben-Amos's first folklore teacher, to collect 71 different folktales from Sephardic tradition out of almost 20,000 different stories and texts.
Although all of the stories were collected in Israel, they come from all over the Mediterranean coast: Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, North Africa, Israel, Italy and Egypt.
"What surprised me in doing this work is . the similarity of Jewish tales from throughout the world," he said.
Ben-Amos writes in-depth commentary on the historical and ethnic background of each tale he studies, comparing each to other Jewish and non-Jewish folklore.
But despite four decades at what he calls a very "supportive" university, Ben-Amos has no plans to slow down.
He still has at least four more volumes of the prize-winning series to write, and he wants to continue his study of folklore among the Edo people in the African nation of Benin.
"I'm not bored," he said.
And as far as Ben-Amos's favorite folktale?
It's "the story I work on next," he said.
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