News & Events

News and events from the department of Scandinavian.

News

July 18, 2021

Congratulations to Senior Lecturer Karen Møller

Karen Møller started as Lecturer and Language Program Coordinator in the UC Berkeley Department of Scandinavian in 1991 and retired July 1, 2021, exactly 30 years later.

January 15, 2021

Science Friday

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. 

December 9, 2020

Atlas Obscura

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.

August 18, 2018

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

August 25, 2015

Berkeley News

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.