M.A. in Scandinavian, University of California, Berkeley
B.A. in English and Scandinavian Studies, Brigham Young University
Natalya Nielsen is a Ph.D. student in the department of Scandinavian with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWS). Natalya’s primary Nordic language is Swedish, but her research moves across the boundaries of the Nordic countries. Her work centers on the intersection of literature, national identity, and political activism and how literary canons and literary culture can be mobilized for national identity formation in the face of multiculturalism and migration to the Nordic Countries in the 21st century. She is particularly interested in contemporary receptions and (re)interpretations of authors such as Tove Ditlevsen, Tove Jansson, and Astrid Lindgren and how they can be positioned as touchpoints in political and cultural discourses about gender egalitarianism as a national and regional identity marker in the Nordic countries.
Natalya is the recipient of 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, the 2023 Fritz O. Fernström Fellowship for Swedish language study in Uppsala, Sweden, 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 teaches beginning and intermediate Swedish language courses and Writing and Composition for the department of Scandinavian at UC Berkeley.
