The campus community is invited to celebrate the remarkable achievements of Professor Mark Sandberg, who will be honored at the 65th Annual Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) ceremony. The event will highlight Professor Sandberg’s inspiring and transformative contributions to teaching in the fields of Scandinavian and Film and Media.
NUUK, Greenland (AP) — Sitting on the pelt of a polar bear hunted by her family, Aviaja Rakel Sanimuinaq says she’s proud to be part of a movement of Greenlanders reclaiming their Inuit traditions and spirituality.
The shaman, who has Inuit facial tattoos, works with spiritual healing practices to help people connect with their ancestors and heal generational trauma. A sign outside her studio in the Greenland capital of Nuuk conveys her role: “Ancient knowledge in a modern world.”
The UC Berkeley assistant professor prioritizes Indigenous knowledge and narratives, seeking to integrate them with scholarly theories and methods.
Alankrita Malhotra is a sophmore and is forging an interdisciplinary path by combining her passions for Data Science and the humanities. Her work on computational folklore and Nordic flavor networks under the guidance of Professor Timothy Tangherlini, who we interviewed for the project last month, highlights the innovative potential of digital humanities. In this interview, Alankrita shares how her academic journey bridges STEM and the arts, the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary study, and the profound connections she’s discovered between history, culture, and technology.
While Elf on a Shelf is a relatively new tradition here in the United States (it gained popularity after the publication of abook(link is external)in 2005), the cute elf is a descendant of a much more mischievous and, at times, homicidal brand of elves stretching all the way back to folk tales from 15th century Scandinavia.
This interview is part of a series featuring members of the Flavor Network research team, a multidisciplinary group exploring the evolution of cuisine through computational analysis. Meet Marcus Romundset, a UC Berkeley student combining his passions for computer science, business, and Scandinavian culture. As part of the team led by Professor Timothy Tangherlini, Marcus is analyzing historical cookbooks to map the evolution of Scandinavian cuisine through flavor networks.
In this first installment of our interview series with the "Flavor Network" research group, Linda Chon interviewed Professor Tim Tangherlini, a computational folklorist in the department of Scandinavian. Professor Tangherlini leads an innovative project that uses data science to trace the evolution of Nordic flavors over the past 200 years. By analyzing historical cookbooks and flavor compounds, his team aims to uncover how Scandinavian cuisine has transformed and what it can reveal about social, cultural, and economic changes in the region.
The Division of Arts & Humanities is proud to announce that Associate Professor of Scandinavian Kate Heslop has been named a co-recipient of the sixteenth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. The prestigious award, presented biennially by the Modern Language Association (MLA), recognizes her groundbreaking work, Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics, published by Fordham University Press.
The MLA prize committee praised Viking Mediologies for its transformative impact, stating:
In Berkeley Talks episode 213, Timothy Tangherlini, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Scandinavian and director of the Folklore Graduate Program(link is external), 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!
After 25 years on campus, Professor Linda Rugg has retired in Summer 2024.
Announcing our 2023 Outstanding GSI, Michael Lawson
Congratulations to Scandinavian PhD Candidate Michael Lawson who, in Spring 2024, was awarded Outstanding GSI for 2023.
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
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.
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.
