Associate Professor, Department Chair, Undergraduate Faculty Advisor
Old Norse
I come from Aotearoa/New Zealand and did my PhD at Sydney University, under the supervision of Margaret Clunies Ross. I worked at universities in England and Switzerland before coming to Berkeley in 2015. My research centers on Old Norse literature, especially poetry, seen in a broad context of visual and textual culture. My perspective on these things is informed by media studies, so I am interested in how cultural meaning is materialized, how it moves across media and forms and is transmitted through time, in the work texts and artefacts do on audiences and communities, and in the way...
Dr. Klingborg works on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Scandinavian literature, with particular focus on its intersections with technologies and media networks. His research interests include literature of labor, the history of reading, night studies, educational and propaganda film, and the history of the Nordic welfare states.
He received his PhD in Literary Studies from Stockholm University in 2024. His first book, Verkar film (Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2024), examines how moving images reshaped Swedish modernist literature as film became an integral part of...
Katie Ritson explores Scandinavian literature and culture from a geographical and environmental perspective. How do literary texts reflect and respond to the places in which they are written and read? How do material processes - cutting trees to make paper, drilling for oil to build and heat new libraries - fuel not just the production of books, but the kinds of stories that are told? How do eroding coastlines, melting glaciers, and a changing climate today affect the way we read nineteenth-century ideas of development and progress? Katie is interested in both contemporary writing and...
Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education
Professor Tangherlini’s research focuses on folklore, and aspects of informal culture in Scandinavia, with a primary focus on Denmark. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he has worked extensively on understanding the circulation of informal storytelling in both agrarian and urban communities, and the manner in which stories both reflect and inform changes in social, economic and political organization. He has developed various computational methods for the study of topic change and geographic...
Professor Wellendorf’s research focuses on the interface between vernacular Old Norse literature and the Latin tradition. He is particularly interested in learned literature, broadly defined, mythography, historiography, and Old Norse treatises on grammar and poetics. He also takes a great interest in Norse mythology and pre-Christian Scandinavian religion.
His doctoral dissertation (Bergen, 2017) concentrated on Old Norse vision literature. Since then, he has published extensively on Medieval Scandinavian Literature, consistently situating Old Norse texts within the broader...
