Professor Sanders’s research centers on questions of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Scandinavian Literature, with an emphasis on Danish Literature (especially H.C. Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Isak Dinesen). She also researches in literary history, romanticism, word & image studies, archaeology in art and literature, ethics and literature, affect and literature, and gender studies. In much of her research, Sanders has devoted attention to the ways in which material culture and visual representation intersect with literary culture. She has published numerous articles on the relationship between words and images, sculpture and death masks, material culture and literature, archaeology and modernity, romanticism, gender and aesthetics, art and ethics. Her work is featured in the History of Nordic Women’s Literature. She is currently working on a book-length study on the subject of Hans Christian Andersen’s material imagination and the lives of things in his work. Sanders is an elected member of Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She serves on numerous editorial boards and is coeditor of volume 3 of A Comparative History of Nordic Literary Cultures.
Books
Konturer: Skulptur- og dødsbilleder fra Guldalderlitteraturen. [Contours: Sculture and Death Images from the Golden Age Literature] Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997. 269 pages.
Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 344 pages. (Paperback edition, Chicago, London, 2012).
Professor Wellendorf’s research interests focus on the interface between vernacular Old Norse literature and the Latin tradition. He is particularly interested in learned literature, broadly defined, mythography, historiography, skaldic poetry, and Old Norse treatises on grammar and poetics.
His doctoral dissertation (Bergen, 2017) concentrated on Old Norse vision literature. Since then, he has published extensively on Medieval Scandinavian Literature. Common to these studies is that Old Norse texts are studied against the backdrop of a wider classical and medieval Latin tradition.
In Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds (Cambridge, 2018), Wellendorf explored the evolving perceptions of pre-Christian Scandinavian myth and religion over a span of five centuries (1200–1700). Currently, he is working on an edition of the Old Norwegian Book of Homilies (AM 619 4to) and a second book on Norse mythology (Working title: The Lives and Deaths of the Norse Gods).
– “Homilies and Christian Instruction.” The Cambridge History of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature, eds. Heather O’Donoghue and Eleanor Parker, 354–371. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2024.
– “From Odinus to Noidus: Cultures in Contact in the Thirteenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Shaman: Journal of the International Association for Academic Research on Shamanism, 147-166. 2023.
– “The Prosimetrum of Old Norse Historiography – Looking for Parallels.” Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 9, 180–216. 2022. Open access.
– “Ethnogenesis and Stranger-Kings in Old Scandinavian Literature.” Scandinavian Studies 94/4, 504-529. 2022.
– “Austrfararvísur and Interreligious contacts in Conversion Age Scandinavia,” The Wild Hunt for Numinous Knowledge: Perspectives on and from the Study of Pre-Christian Nordic Religions in Honour of Jens Peter Schjødt, eds. Karen Bek-Pedersen, Sophie Bønding, Luke John Murphy, Simon Nygaard and Morten Warmind. Religionsvidenskabeligt tidskrift 74, 469-489. 2022. Open access.
A number of his publications can be found here.
Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
The Fourth Grammatical Treatise, ed. with Margaret Clunies Ross. London: The Viking Society, 2014. Open access.
Fjöld veit hon frœða: Utvalde arbeid av Else Mundal, ed. with Odd Einar Haugen and Bernt Øyvind Thorvaldsen. Bibliotheca Nordica 5. Oslo: Novus, 2012.
Kristelig visionslitteratur i norrøn tradition. Bibliotheca Nordica 2. Oslo: Novus, 2009.
Oral art forms and their passage into writing, ed. with Else Mundal. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008.
Research interests: Early Scandinavian literature and culture. Old Icelandic language. Film history and theory (also through the Rhetoric Department). Emphasis in both medieval and film fields has been on social-historical topics (especially sex/gender and law) and narrative history and theory (especially issues of orality/literacy and genre).
Current projects: Present research includes work on legal process and narrative in both its film and its saga manifestations. Her book-in-progress, The People’s Plot: Trials, Movies, and the Adversarial Imagination, will be published by Princeton University Press. She is also doing research into the legal origins of Icelandic saga narrative.
Professor Clover is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Lund University, Sweden as well as an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Iceland. She is also the recipient of the UC Berkeley Distinguished Service Award.
Legacy Project Video: https://youtu.be/-V2FqmdaZhQ
Books
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton Univ. Press and British Film Institute, 1992. Reissued as a Princeton Classic, 2014.
Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide. Ed. with John Lindow. Cornell Univ. Press, 1985. Rpt. University of Toronto Press, 2005.
The Medieval Saga. Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.
Professor Sandberg’s research centers on questions of comparative media history and late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century visual cultures, including the intermedial history of literature, recording technologies, museum display, theater, and silent film. Throughout his career he has developed research specialties in Norwegian literature and cultural history (especially Ibsen and Hamsun), Scandinavian film history, literary and film historiography, and international forms of current serial television. Throughout much of his research, Sandberg has devoted attention to the ways in which the experiences of readers and spectators have contributed to the discourses of visual and literary culture. He enjoys working with wide-ranging historical sources in order to explore the cultural context of films and literary texts. The book Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny, springs from this approach and was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. His next book project concerns the connection between trauma discourse and popular forms of seriality in recent American television. Sandberg has served as President of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, and is currently President of the Ibsen Society of America. He is also a lead editor for the ICLA project, Nordic Literature: A Comparative History. He holds a joint appointment in UCB’s Department of Film and Media.
Books
Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.