Faculty Spotlight

Submitted by Debbie Sue Olson on
Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Advisor Ia Dübois

The daily life at the Scandinavian Department is full of excitement and challenges. The excitement comes of course from my dear colleagues and our many wonderful students, undergraduates and graduates. Last fall I taught the large “sex course” again with near 200 students to keep track of with the help of my TA, Sabina Ivenäs. Every time I teach the course it is different and creates a new challenge thanks to the new course material and the very different dynamic of each new student body. In the winter I was intrigued by our great graduate students who took my Scandinavian poetry course. These students proved that poetry is not an esoteric genre but rather a tool for analyses of the Scandinavian societies of today. This became evident as their final papers offered poetic perspectives on, for example, adoption and feminism in Sweden, political power struggles in the Baltic and Icelandic films.     

As the department’s Undergraduate Advisor, I have also ample opportunity to learn much about our undergraduate students as they share their goals for the future and struggle with difficult decisions during the academic year. We ended last year with 41 majors and 45 minors, 86 in total. These numbers do not, of course, reflect the many hundreds of students who take our courses as electives. While Scandinavian Area Studies, Swedish and Norwegian are the largest programs, all my colleagues are working hard to increase our student numbers and make our footprint on campus even more noticeable. 

Barbro Osher Endowed Swedish Professor Lotta Gavel Adams
 Barbro Osher Endowed Swedish Professor Ann-Charlotte (Lotta) Gavel Adams

The academic year 2013-14 had several highlights in addition to my regular teaching of the Advanced Swedish 300-series, the seminar-style Scandinavian Women Writers course, and the large enrollment (120 student strong) Scandinavian Children’s Literature course. This latter course is growing both in student enrollment and in library holdings. The Suzzallo Library got a donation from the Jane Isaksson Lea Foundation of $2,000 to add to the library’s stock of Swedish children’s books, money which our Nordic Studies librarian Dan Mandeville spent judiciously on a book-buying trip to Scandinavia. In addition, the Swedish Club of Seattle donated some 100 additional children’s books to the library. These donations came in extra handy as we now also have graduate students interested in researching and writing about topics in Scandinavian children’s literature.

On the scholarly front, I delivered two papers at international conferences. At the SASS conference at Yale University in mid-March, I spoke on “Nature and Passion in Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berlings Saga, and at the XIX International Strindberg’s Conference in Rome, Italy, in early June, I gave a paper entitled “Constructing Strindberg’s Life Across Borders.”

In March, I got the good news that Barbro Osher, Swedish studies supporter extraordinaire, had decided to upgrade my Endowed Osher Professorship in Swedish Studies to an Endowed Chair. I am honored, proud, and humbled to be the holder of that Chair. 

Professor Christine Ingebritsen
 Professor Christine Ingebritsen

During the 2013-2014 Academic Year, Professor Ingebritsen published a collection of articles in her edited volume, "SCANDINAVIA AND ITS LEGACY IN EUROPE," and contributed a chapter on Stieg Larsson and the New Globalism in the tribute to Peter Katzenstein published in 2014 by Routledge Press. She prepared the UW Men's Soccer Team for competition in Scandinavia by providing background lectures; and she accompanied Carol Niccolls on a tour of Venice and Croatia with UW Travels. A new course, "Eco-Capitalism" continues to attract talented students, and this year we are competing for a library writing prize.

Sverre Arestad Endowed Chair in Norwegian Studies, Professor Leiren
 Terje Leiren, Sverre Arestad Endowed Professor in Norwegian Studies

The academic year 2013-2014 has been a busy and productive year. In addition to teaching courses in third-year Norwegian and the sequence of Scandinavian history courses, Professor Leiren focused largely on the bicentennial celebration of the establishment of Norway's Constitution of 1814. He contributed a chapter to 1814-2014: RED, WHITE AND BLUE, NORWEGIAN CONSTITUTION, AMERICAN INSPIRATION, which was published in Oslo in a dual language format of English and Norwegian. Leiren examined Norway's position "In the shadow of the great powers" struggling to gain recognition as an independent country while the Napoleonic wars raged in Europe. He gave several invited talks on the dramatic events of 1814, including at a meeting with Canadian legislators in Vancouver, British Columbia, in April. With his co-general editor, Christine Ingebritsen, Leiren helped to facilitate the publication of three new books in the UW Press series "New Directions in Scandinavian Studies."  These included Arne Hassing, CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO NAZIISM IN NORWAY, 1940-1945; Tim Tangherlini, DANISH FOLKTALES, LEGENDS AND OTHER STORIES; and Guntis Smidchens, THE POWER OF SONG: NONVIOLENT NATIONAL CULTURE IN THE BALTIC SINGING REVOLUTION. Scandinavian studies remains strong and vital at the University of Washington.

Professor Andrew Nestingen
 Professor Andrew Nestingen

During 2013-2014 I continued to work on film-studies research, writing articles on film noir in the Nordic countries and on Aki Kaurismäki. The article on film noir was an overview of the film noir in the Nordic countries, which I wrote for International Noir, and is due out in fall 2014. Films noir are generally thought to be pessimistic crime films made in Hollywood during the late 1940s and ‘50s. But there were also significant film noirs made in Finland, Denmark, and Sweden. Arguably the richest film noir in Nordic cinema was Norwegian Edith Carlmar’s Døden er et kjærtegn/Death is a Caress (1949). Interestingly, the Nordic films found some of their impetus in French film of the 1930s, which often concerned doomed characters living in shadowy, stylized worlds, as well as in German expressionist cinema. Death is a Caress also connects with expressionism in the visual arts. Arve Moen, author of the novel on which the film is based, was also an art critic who wrote a book on Munch, and of course the femme fatale figures in his drawings and paintings. My articles on Kaurismäki will appear in the Handbook of Nordic Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist, and in a Finnish book on art and the market. The first argues that punk rock is an important source for Kaurismäki’s filmmaking, and the latter article analyzes Kaurismäki’s Le Havre as a white-savior story – a type of film generally thought to emphasize the moral goodness of white characters who act on behalf of characters of color, who are depicted as passive and unable to help themselves. During summer 2014, I also took baby steps in a new book project, The Story of School: Culture and Education in Finland, Scandinavia, and the United States. The book seeks to understand how ideas of children, parents, and the school figure in the way education is understood and debated in Finland, the other Nordic countries, and North America. I’m also delighted to begin this year as Graduate Program Coordinator. I look forward to working with graduate students to make small changes to the graduate program, which will help them to work more quickly toward their degrees, increase their satisfaction, and continue to find academic and non-academic jobs that matter.

Professor and Department Chair, Jan Sjåvik
 Jan Sjåvik, Professor and Department Chair

Jan Sjåvik taught several of his favorite courses this year, including his Ibsen course, his Hamsun course, and his Kierkegaard course. All in all he taught 245 students, which included the 130 students who took SCAND 100, Introduction to Scandinavia during Autum Quarter, 2013. He also taught this course during Summer Quarter, 2014, but not with nearly as many students. He published an article on Hamsun and Garborg in C. Claire Thomson and Elettra Carbone, eds., Love and Modernity: Scandinavian Literature, Drama and Letters. Essays in Honour of Professor Janet Garton (London: Norvik Press, 2014). After more than thirty-six years of service, Jan Sjåvik will retire from the University of Washington on December 15, 2014.

Kazickas Family Endowed Associate Professor Guntis Šmidchens
 Kazickas Family Endowed Associate Professor Guntis Šmidchens

Guntis Smidchens was on academic leave during fall and winter quarters, researching Baltic song traditions from 1991 to 2014. In summers 2013 and 2014 he did fieldwork at the three Baltic national song festivals and the 2014 World Choir Games in Riga. While recording many hours of song performances and interviews, he was also a "participant observer" at the festivals, singing on stage together with tens of thousands of Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians. He is now writing up the results of this intensive research, to begin work on a sequel for his book that was published in January 2014, The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Cultures in the Baltic Singing Revolution. In Fall 2013, he spent two weeks at Vilnius University as part of a faculty exchange sponsored by Lithuania's Ministry of Education; in Spring Quarter 2014, Guntis was back on campus, teaching courses about Baltic cultures and current events in the Baltic.

In May, Guntis travelled to Riga, where the President of Latvia presented him with the Cross of Recognition, Fourth Class, for advancing friendly relations between the United States and Latvia in the University of Washington's Baltic Studies Program. He himself notes that the Baltic Program has always been a team effort: Many people and departments at the UW have ensured the success of large projects such as the the Latvian language lectureship, jointly funded since 2006 by the University of Washington and the Latvian Language Agency; the UW Libraries' steadily growing collections of books, films and choral music; and the UW choirs' four concert tours to the Baltic countries.

The Baltic program hosted lectures by several prominent speakers to mark the ten-year anniversary of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joining the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance: Glen Grant gave three lectures about current military security of the Baltic states, the Nordic states, and Poland, and Agne Grigas analyzed energy security of the Baltic region. Žigimantas Pavilionis, Ambassador of Lithuania to the USA, gave the keynote speech at the Model EU Conference, an event that brings together top students from numerous universities in the Pacific Northwest.

Professor Marianne Stecher
 Professor Marianne Stecher 

It was great news for the department to learn recently that a scholarly book by one of our faculty members had received positive front-page page coverage in Politiken, Denmark’s largest daily newspaper. It came as a welcome surprise to Marianne Stecher to see that The Creative Dialectic in Karen Blixen’s Essays was awarded “five hearts” and named a “smashing good study” (“knagende god afhandling”) in the published press review on September 2nd this year.   Politikens coverage stirred wider discussion and enthusiasm in the Danish press about the new study by a UW Professor, which was also reported in a couple Norwegian and Swedish papers, including Svenska Dagbladet and Bergens Tidende.   Denmark’s Politiken reported that Stecher’s new book addressing Blixen’s work as a public intellectual is “an important contribution to Blixen research” which “challenges decades of criticism of the Danish writer.”    

During the 2013 – 2013 academic year, Marianne taught well-attended undergraduate courses, such as "Hans Christian Andersen and the Fairy Tale", "Masterpieces in Scandinavian Literature," and "War and Occupation in the Nordic and Baltic Region," and chaired two Ph.D. dissertations in Scandinavian literature; one by Dr. Kirstine Kastbjerg and the other by Dr. Melissa Lucas.  Marianne also continued to serve on the American Scandinavian Foundation Grants and Fellowships Selection Committee, which meets in New York City at the Scandinavian House each year.  She also presented a paper at the annual SASS conference, held at Yale University in March, and continued to serve as the inaugural president of DANA (Danish Academic Network in America) and as a board member of the Gudrun Gytel Scholarship Fund.  In May, she gave a public lecture on her new book on Karen Blixen in the Book Lust series which was organized by the Department’s advisory board.  

Lecturer Lars Jenner
 Lecturer Lars Jenner

Since September 2012, Lars Jenner has worked in the Department of Scandinavian Studies as Lecturer of large enrollment courses, including SCAND 100 Intro to Scandinavian Culture, SCAND 270 Sagas of the Vikings & SCAND 330 Scandinavian Mythology. He has recently been hired by UW Educational Outreach, to develop an online version of the sagas course, which will be offered to UW matriculated students starting Winter 2015. He also wrote book reviews this past year on Chicago Swedes: They spoke from the Heart, Lilly and Lennart Setterdahl (Swedish American Historical Quarterly) and News from Other Worlds: Studies in Nordic Folklore, Mythology and Culture, ed. by Merrill Kaplan and Timothy R. Tangherlini (Western Folklore. Additionally, he was active in the community delivering public lectures on Nordic mythology for the Nordic Study Circle, Gig Harbor, in March and the Swedish Club, Seattle, in May, as well as giving the keynote speech at the Skandia Midsommar fest, St. Edwards Park, Kenmore, in June.

Visiting Danish Lecturer Désirée Ohrbeck
 Visiting Danish Lecturer Désirée Ohrbeck

During the academic year 2013-2014, Désirée taught second year Danish, supervised reading students as well as two undergraduate courses on Danish Literary History and Culture. Two artists came from Denmark, one writer, Lea Carlsen Ejsing, and one fantasy illustrator, Jesper Ejsing, to visit the UW this year. The 50 students engaged in a lively discussion after presentations on the topic of storytelling and the role of the artist.

Also, the Seattle area based writer, feminist, and adventurer, Barbara Sjøholm visited the Danish Literary History and Culture class to talk about the Danish writer, painter and adventurer Emilie Demant Hatt who travelled with the Sami people. This talk initiated a discussion about contemporary Sami-Norwegian-Danish writer Maren Uthaug and a class discussion about Scandinavian homogeneity and identity.
 
Désirée attended the annual SASS conference at Yale in New Heaven and gave a presentation on “Pleasure and Place in Maren Uthaug´s Ellers går det godt (2013)” and was invited to submit an abstract on the same topic to the 2015 MLA conference in Vancouver BC. Throughout the academic year, Désirée had several Danish college students visit her second year Danish classes as well as her Danish Literature and Culture classes, something that the students expressed great appreciation.
 
Désirée has actively engaged in several Nordic heritage events in the Seattle area in this academic year. To mention a few, she attended the Ambassador to Denmark´s speech at Seattle City Hall titled “The Climate Neutral Collaborative between Washington State and Denmark”, she has attended several of the events at The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, she celebrated H. M. Queen Margrethe II´s birthday at a greatly attended reception, and she regularly met with present and former students to help boost the students feeling of belonging to a Danish community.  

John P. Morgridge Lecturer Olivia Gunn
 John P. Morgridge Lecturer Olivia Gunn

Olivia was very excited to return to her Alma Mater this spring as the John P. Morgridge Lecturer in Norwegian Studies. Navigating the beautiful campus after more than a decade’s absence – and while the cherry blossoms were falling – was a bit dream-like and made her breathless at first. However, she was right at home in SCAND 280, Ibsen and his Major Plays in English, and was welcomed neatly into the swing of things by the Department. The students warmed up to her perhaps cold sounding course title, “Ibsen and Ibsenisms,” when they realized that this title in fact encapsulates more than 100 years of passionate debate over the literary and theatrical significance of Ibsen’s dramatic production. When they handed in their final projects, they expressed surprise and pleasure at the fun of working through some of those debates (e.g., dated versus perennially relevant, feminist versus universalist, realist versus modernist, etc.). Olivia's second course, SCAND 490/590, Special Topics in Scandinavian Literature: “Norwegian Reproduction,” was proof of the inspiration and dynamism that can result from combining research and teaching. Together, the students and Olivia explored the modernization and medicalization of birth in Norway and it's attendant discourses across a broad range of sources, from reality television, through the rhetoric of social science, to dramas, novels, and films, always aided by feminist and queer theories of (pro)creation. Olivia's own research agenda has grown thanks to this course, which enabled her to work closely with students and with the ideas and materials that she finds thrilling (“så forfærdelig dejligt og spændende”!). Olivia looks forward to riding the momentum of her visit as the next academic year unfolds. All and all, it was a successful return, and a thousand thanks are due to all who made my visit possible and fruitful – the donor, students, administrators, and supremely collegial faculty in the Scandinavian Studies Department at the UW.
 
Visiting Scholar Hilmar Þór Hilmarsson
 Visiting Scholar Hilmar Þór Hilmarsson
 
Hilmar Þór Hilmarsson, Professor at the University of Akureyri, School of Business and Science, was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington during spring 2014. He used his research sabbatical to write several articles and to make contacts with colleagues in North America. He was also invited to speak about his research on the economic and financial crisis in Iceland at universities across the United States. His presentation at the University of California Berkeley, titled: “Iceland in an Era of Shadow Banking: A Model for Crash and Recovery?”, was co-sponsored by the European Union Center of Excellence; Institute of European Studies; and Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He also made invited presentations on crisis issues at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and at Cornell University’s Global Finance Initiative. In addition to this, Hilmar gave an Earth Energy IGERT Seminar at the Cornell Earth Energy Institute discussing Iceland’s transition to clean energy and its potential in assisting emerging market countries in their transition. In addition to his research on Iceland, Hilmar has also recently been focusing on Latvia’s post crisis economic recovery and comparing it with the post crisis situation in Iceland. He worked for the World Bank in Latvia for four years and was a Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics during fall 2013. He made an academic presentation on this topic at the Yale Conference on Baltic and Scandinavian Studies and a public presentation about it at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, focusing on the financial crisis and also the human crisis. Hilmar also enjoyed interacting with students when he was invited into classrooms at American University, School of Public Affairs in Washington DC; Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business Administration; Pacific Lutheran University, Scandinavian Studies Program in Tacoma; and in Dr. Ingebritsen’s class at the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington.
 
Lars Sætre
 Visting Scholar Lars Sætre
 
Lars Sætre, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen, is also project leader of the inter-aesthetic, international research project ”Text, Action and Space (TAS)”. His UW-affiliation four years ago provided invaluable research time to complete TAS’ first volume, Exploring Textual Action (2010; eds. Sætre, Lombardo, Gullestad), in which his own contribution was ”Powering Textual Action: Duras’ Space in Véra Baxter”. – This time, in 2014, Professor Sætre spent the first part of his Seattle sojourn completing the introductory chapter and going through the proofs rounds with Aarhus University Press for the publishing of TAS’ second anthology, Exploring Text and Emotions (2014; eds. Sætre, Lombardo, Zanetta). His own contribution among the 2014 volume’s 15 articles is ”Topography, Sense and Emotion: The Alterity of Textual Action in Jon Fosse”. – The book was published late February, and for its presentation at the AUP Sætre travelled to Aarhus for five days and convened with his co-editors and 400 participants at an international seminar for the occasion. There, he gave an invited guest lecture, ”Affects and Emotions in Modern Fiction, Drama, Film, and the Arts – An Intersection Between Aesthetics and Knowledge”. – Then, again in Seattle, Professor Sætre and his project’s leadership group were engaged in laying the scholarly groundwork, establishing the frames and providing workshop funding for Project TAS’ Phase III, which will lead up to its third volume with the AUP: ”Exploring Texts, Media and Memory”. He also spent considerable time conducting library work for and research on his own Phase III contribution, which is about textual-actional memory, media and materiality in Renate Dorrestein’s A Heart of Stone. – At the same time, during the Winter and the Spring quarters Sætre has been preoccupied with research for his on-going book project on comparative readings of performativity, spaces, materiality and generic converging in modern and late modern drama and prose fiction (Kittelsen, Fosse, Teigen, Vesaas, Knutzon, Duras, Kane, Dorrestein, DeLillo; Miller, Rancière). – During his 2014 research sabbatical at UW, Professor Sætre furthermore completed scholarly translations into Norwegian of two of Walter Benjamin’s complex language-philosophical essays: ”Loven om det som likner / Lehre vom Ähnlichen” (1933), and ”Om språk generelt og om språket til mennesket / Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (1916). The former appeared in June in Arild Linneberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin. Skrifter i utvalg, Vol. 1, Oslo 2014. The latter appears in August in Arild Linneberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin. Skrifter i utvalg, Vol. 2, Oslo 2014. – While Professor Sætre from 2006–2012 served as Director of the Norwegian National Researcher Training School for PhD-students in Literary and Aesthetic Studies ”Text Image Sound Space (TBLR)” [members: UiB, UiS, NTNU, UiA, and UiT], he currently serves as member of it's national board. In this capacity he has during his 2014 UW sojourn been working with the national board in preparing two up-coming PhD researcher-training courses: one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Fall 2014), and the following in Saint Petersburg, Russia (2015; organizational visit October 2014). – During his Winter and Spring quarters at UW, Sætre has remained in continuous contact with and helped establish two research and research publication groups that were founded in 2014, and to whose International Advisory Boards he was appointed during the winter: (a) Britain’s Rowman & Littlefield International’s publication series Reinventing Critical Theory (eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Annika Thiem (both: Villanova)), and (b) the Oslo-based, international research project ”Empathy in Literature”. – While at Scandinavian/UW Sætre retained his Master- and PhD-supervising functions at the UiB, and he was happy to see his Bergen candidates do very well at their exams and finals. One of them – an A Master – passed with distinction employing Henri Bergson’s theories in a thesis about ”Memory, Perception, Time and Character in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse”. – During his 6 months at Scandinavian/UW, Professor Sætre also attended and with great interest enjoyed a number of guest lectures organized by the department and in Ballard. With great pleasure he also took part in the highlights of the Scandinavian/UW academic year as well as in the celebration of Norway’s Constitution Day, the 17th of May. Not least, Lars Sætre and his wife enjoyed staying in close contact with several faculty members and their families for the duration of their stay, and they take this opportunity to cordially thank everyone involved for hosting their affiliations and for having them as Visiting Scholars in 2014.
 
Visiting American Scandinavian Foundation Lecturer Ann-Kristen Wallengren
 Visiting American Scandinavian Foundation Lecturer Ann-Kristen Wallengren

I am a Professor in Film Studies, Lund University, Sweden where I got my Ph.D. 1998 in Comparative Literature: Drama, Theatre, Film. My research embraces questions about film and national and cultural identity, representation, ideology and transnationality, as well as on different aspects of film music. My teaching covers most areas in the discipline, preferably film history, film analysis and theory, as well as I am supervising postgraduates and doctoral students. I am a member in a number of organizations such as SCMS, SASS, SAAS and NECS, and I am part of the editorial board for the journal "Music and the Moving Image" (Illinois University Press).

For the moment I am researching two main areas. The first one is “Sweden, ‘swedishness’ and the images of Sweden in a transnational perspective”. This project explores how the image of Sweden is constructed in film cultures of different kinds, for example in Swedish promotional films aimed at embassies and cultural centers, and in films from other countries in which Sweden, or Swedish culture, is somehow thematized. It also analyzes the reception of the Swedish film in the U.S. in cross-cultural comparisons with the Swedish reception.

The second one, “Film music narration and laboratory experimental methods”, explores the possibilities of using laboratory equipment to measure if and how the understanding of a film narrative is affected by sound and music. Eye-tracking measurements are employed to see whether, and in which ways, attention changes when different sound environments are applied to the same scenes. The project is thus primarily methodological.

Recently I published a monograph in Swedish about the cinematic representation of the Swedish-Americans and the emigration to USA, published in English during autumn 2014 (Welcome Home Mr. Swanson. Swedish Emigrants and Swedishness in Film). Among other publications can be mentioned  En afton på Röda Kvarn. Svensk stumfilm som musikdrama (1998, An Evening at Röda Kvarn. Swedish Silent Film as Music Drama) and Samhällsbyggarnas tv-berättande. Estetik och ideologi i utbildningsprogram för televisionen (2001,Television Teaching by the Builders of Modern Society. Aesthetics and Ideology in Educational Programmes for Television). As editor I have together with Professor Erik Hedling Solskenslandet. Svensk film på 2000-talet (2006,The Sunshine Country: Swedish Film in the 21st Century). A second anthology was published in spring 2014, with the title Den nya svenska filmen: kultur, kriminalitet, kakofoni (New Swedish Cinema: Culture, Criminality, Cacophony). Other publications include articles on Swedish film and national and cultural identity, ideology and transnationality, as well as on different aspects of film music.

My home institution at Lund University is a center organization called Centre for Languages and Literature (Språk- och litteraturcentrum, SOL), with about 30 different subject areas, 3000 students (of which 100 are PhD students) and 250 employees (faculty and staff). For about ten years I have been serving as director of studies in Film Studies, and from January 2015 I am elected to serve as one of three Heads of Department at SOL, a task I am much honored to be entrusted with.

In the autumn quarter 2014 at UW, I teach the course "Cinema, Migration and the Making of 'the Other' in Modern Sweden" (Scand 490/590) together with Hans Wallengren.

My homepage at Lund University can be reached here:
In Swedish: http://www.sol.lu.se/person/AnnKristinWallengren
In English: http://www.sol.lu.se/en/person/AnnKristinWallengren

 
 
 
 
Visiting American Scandinavian Foundation Lecturer Hans Wallengren
 Visiting American Scandinavian Foundation Visiting Lecturer Hans Wallengren

Since 1995, I have been linked to the Dept. of History in Lund in various shapes and to different extents – as teacher, assistant professor, researcher and director at the Center for Labor History in nearby city of Landskrona. During the 1980s and early 1990s, I was a PhD student at the Department of History at Lund University where I investigated power relations in the rental market of late 19th- and early 20th-century Malmö. As a university teacher I have taught in different fields, such as social-, labor-, urban- and environmental history. In 2009-2013 I was also part of a research project financed by the Swedish Research Council on xenophobia and the Labor movement in postwar Landskrona, which resulted in the book Socialdemokrater möter invandrare. Arbetarrörelsen, invandrarna och främlingsfientligheten i Landskrona under efterkrigstiden. (Nordic Academic Press, 2014). My current research deals with changes in the Swedish trucking industry and the profession of truck drivers. Another project investigates questions of class and fashion within the Swedish and American craft beer movement since the 1980s.

 
Adjunct Associate Professor (Architecture) Peter Cohan
 Adjunct Associate Professor (Architecture) Peter Cohan
 
For the sixth time this summer Peter is leading a study/travel program called Architecture in Scandinavia. The eight-week program, co-taught with Jennifer Dee, runs from mid-June to mid-August and is based the architecture school at KTH in Stockholm. It includes extensive travel throughout Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The 25 students participate in various exercises that engage the architecture of the Nordic countries at different scales - from making measured detail drawings of significant buildings on our travels - to developing psycho-geographies of various neighborhoods in Stockholm using the Situationists’ technique of the derive for getting lost in the city.  
 
Peter is also the coordinator of the Scan|Design Architecture Internship Program, which has awarded six-month internships to MArch students Doug Brandon and Cale Wilbur at Dorte Mandrup Arkitektur in Copenhagen beginning in January 2015; and the Scan|Design Distinguished Visiting Professor Program, which was able to bring Danish furniture designer Erling Christoffersen to teach a furniture studio with architecture professor Kimo Griggs this winter.
 
Affiliate Associate Professor Lizette Gradén
 Affiliate Associate Professor Lizette Gradén
 
Lizette Gradén is chief curator at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle and Affiliate Associate Professor. She was involved with the department in several ways, including co-advising Heather Short along with Professor Guntis Šmidchens and MA candidate Britt Lewis along with professor Lotta Gavel-Adams. With the Department Advisory board and faculty, Lizette organized the Book Lust series, aimed at presenting faculty members’ recent publications to a wide audience. Professor Christine Ingebritsen and Lizette Graden collaborated on an exhibition project on early Scandinavian leaders in Washington. Conferences: Lizette co-organized two the folklore sessions at the SASS conference in New Haven and organized a session called Seattle Museums: Building Place + Building community at the American Alliance of Museum Conference. She also served on the local host committee for the American Alliance of Museum Conference, held in Seattle in May 2014. In June Lizette gave a keynote “Selected stops along the Norwegian highway: Heritage Practices and Norwegian-American life after 1945” at the NAHA symposium in Valdres, Norway. Her publications were Performing Nordic Spaces: Everyday life and institutional culture, co-edited with Professor Peter Aronsson (2013) and a special issue on Nordic Spaces in the Journal of American Studies in Scandinavia (2014).
 
 
Affiliate Associate Professor (Scandinavian) Katherine J. Hanson
 
Katherine continues to enjoy her Affiliate appointment in the Department and is pleased with any and all opportunities to help out in the classroom, this past year as a guest lecturer. Happily, she is still working with her co-translator Judith Messick: this spring their translation of Amalie Skram’s novel, Fru Inés, was published by Norvik Press. An article Katherine wrote on the imprint of pietism in Skram’s writing is included in an essay collection, Love and Modernity, just released by Norvik Press. She regularly offer courses on Scandinavian literature and culture at the Creative Retirement Institute in Edmonds, an experience that both stimulates and enriches!
 
Affiliate Professor Violeta Kelertas
 Affiliate Professor Violeta Kelertas
 
Violeta received a doctor honoris causa from Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, in early 2012. She has presented two different papers on the 19th C. Lithuanian writer Julija Zemaite, attempting to show how the writer is relevant in the 21st century. One paper in English was read at Yale University at the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies conference; the other in Lithuanian for the Santara Sviesa organization in Alanta, Lithuania. The latter will be published in Vilnius, as the status of Zemaite is currently in question, especially as regards school curricula. The translation manuscript of this classic of Lithuanian literature is close to being finished. It contains an introduction by Kelertas and translations of some of her most important work, completed by Kelertas and Maryte Racys, the great-granddaugher of the writer who also resides in Seattle.
 
Kelertas' translation of Ricardas Gavelis' famous short story "Handless" was reprinted in "The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature" (2014). Currently Kelertas is working as Special Translation Editor for Books from Lithuania, a division of the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, helping them to improve translations of the top ten books of Lithuanian prose fiction of 2014 for a catalogue to be used for dissemination at book fairs, etc.
 
Much of Kelertas' time is spent in editing Euroenglish texts from the Baltics, both for the "Journal of Baltic Studies" and various other publications.
 
Affiliate Professor Jens Lund
 
Jens Lund, recently retired from the Washington State Parks & Recreation Commission, presented the paper "Revisiting King Christian & the Yellow Star: A Historical Legend as Personal Journey" on June 6 at the 32nd Conference of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. The paper concerned the legends pertaining to King Christian X of Denmark & that country's Jewish population during the 1940-45 Nazi occupation and the necessity for revising some earlier assumptions about those legends in light of recent historical revelations.
 
Affiliate Assistant Professor Aldis Purs
 
Aldis Purs received the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) Book Prize for 2012-2014, which "recognizes an outstanding English-language scholarly book in Baltic Studies" for his Baltic Facades: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Since 1945 (Reaktionbooks, 2012) at the AABS-SASS Conference in Yale in 2014. In December of 2013, he was an invited participant at the University of Uppsala's International Conference "Latvia: A Work in Progress? 100 Years of State and Nation-building." His contribution, a survey of the economic history of Latvia, is slated to be in the volume inspired by the conference that is in pre-production. Purs also contributed an article on World War I orphans in the independent state of Latvia, which after a laborious path, is slated for publication in Nick Baron (ed), Nurturing the Nation: Displaced Children, State Ideology and Social Identity in Eastern Europe and the USSR, 1918-1953 (Brill, at press).
 
Affiliate Professor (Scandinavian, University of Vienna) Sven Hakon Rossel
 Affiliate Professor (Scandinavian, University of Vienna) Sven Hakon Rossel
 
Even though Sven officially retired in the fall of 2012 he is still teaching full-time in his old department, i.e. four weekly courses as well as advising a large number of MA- and Phd-students as well as presenting papers at conferences and giving public lectures all over Austria and in Denmark.
 
He has published a selection of articles in Danish newspapers with the title Litteratur på kryds og tværs. Strejftog fra B.S. Ingemann til James Joyce (Forlaget Hovedland) as well as various articles on Hans Christian Andersen, e.g. on Andersen and Italy in the journal Anderseniana, and on Andersen, Albert Camus and Dag Hammarskjöld in the journal Weltgewissen: Pannonisch – Europäisch – Kosmopolitisch. For the yearbook Barn af Vendsyssel. Vendelboer fortæller, vol. 19, he has written an autobiographical sketch telling episodes from his life and career in Thailand, Denmark, Germany, the United States and Austria.
 
Finally he received a festschrift in his honour, Deeds of the Dane. Festschrift für Sven H. Rossel (Verlag Praesens), and in Copenhagen, on October 4, 2014 he will be awarded the Steen Steensen Blicher Prize acknowledging his many years of teaching and promoting Danish literature abroad.
 
When not teaching, writing and doing research Sven enjoys malt whiskies, shares fond memories of Seattle with his family and spends much time in Cambridge, UK, where his son, Sven jr., is a student of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Celtic. His oldest daughter, Eva, is now pursuing a management career in Seattle, while number two in line, Pia, will soon have finished her violin studies in Vienna and thereafter be looking for a job in one of the better symphony orchestras.
 
 
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