Natalya Nielsen is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Scandinavian with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWS). Her dissertation work interrogates how global authorship is shaped and branded by corporations which hold copyright and licensing rights, specifically looking at Moomin Characters Oy Ltd. and the Astrid Lindgren Company. Her work draws on methods from the sociology of literature, branding and marketing research, feminist studies, and adaptation studies.
Natalya is the recipient of the 2026 Fritz O. Fernström Fellowship, the 2024 Aurora Borealis prize in Area Studies from the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS), the 2023 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, and the 2022 Berkeley Language Center (BLC) Fellowship for language pedagogy research. She has presented her work at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference as well as at the annual SASS conference. She has taught beginning and intermediate Swedish language courses as well as introductory coursework in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Department.
