News & Events

In Berkeley Talks episode 213, Timothy Tangherlini, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Scandinavian and director of the Folklore Graduate Program, discusses the vital role that storytelling plays in many cultures around

The Department of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley seeks applications for an Assistant Professor in the area of Swedish or Norwegian Literature, Culture, and Society, with an expected start date of July 1, 2025.

Asta Mønsted joins the Division of Arts & Humanities as an assistant professor in the Department of Scandinavian(link is external). Born and raised in Uummannaq, North Greenland, her research focuses on the Greenlandic Inuit’s oral history and its potential to be evidenced in archaeological remains. She aims for the oral history to challenge instead of supplement the archaeological record in an effort to reconceptualize typical field methods.

Congratulations, Prof. Linda Haverty Rugg!

Announcing our 2023 Outstanding GSI, Michael Lawson

Do a quick review of the top news for any day in the past 10 years and you’ll likely find that disinformation — barely disguised and often overt — has been a constant, powerful driver of political and social conflict in the U.S. and worldwide.

In order to preserve the history and accomplishments of its distinguished faculty, the University of California Berkeley Emeriti Association (UCBEA) has begun making video recordings of interviews with individual emeriti.

Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them.

Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships.

Congratulations to Senior Lecturer Karen Møller

Listen here

2020 was a fruitful year for conspiracy theories: QAnon gained followers, COVID-19 misinformation proliferated in viral YouTube videos, and in November, President Trump helped proliferate the entirely false narrative that the election he’d lost was, in fact, stolen. 

In the winter of 1984, Timothy Tangherlini worked on a dairy farm on the Danish island of Funen. One day, while brushing cattle in the barn, he spotted a tiny man in a hat sitting on the back of one of the cows. When Tangherlini tried to speak to the stranger, the little man jumped out the barn window. Assuming it was a trick, he told the couple that owned the farm about the encounter. They both shrugged. “That was the nisse,” they explained.

On Monday (August 13th 2018) at Bessastaðir, the Icelandic president’s residence, new members of the Order of the Falcon were honored including Professor John Lindow and Professor Carol Clover

Modern Icelandic is a language spoken fluently by about 320,000 of the world’s more than 7 billion inhabitants, and now more maybe be speaking it as UC Berkeley offers it as a regular course for the first time this fall.

The idea is to facilitate Berkeley students’ work on Iceland by relating to the language made legendary by Viking sagas about the explorers’ ninth-century settlement of the island on the southern edge of the Arctic Circle.