Associate Professor, Department Chair, Undergraduate Faculty Advisor
Old Norse
Professor Heslop’s research centres on Old Norse textual culture, especially skaldic and eddic poetry, the sagas and the heroic tradition. She approaches this material from a medial perspective, and asks what ‘media theory’ we can detect– in an epoch before the mass media—in Old Norse texts and images. Relevant here is not only the media transition associated with the arrival of manuscript textuality, but also multi- and intermedial phenomena in images, inscriptions, and texts. A complementary area of current research interest, medieval Scandinavian representations and...
Dr. Mønsted’s research focuses on the Greenlandic Inuit’s oral history and its potential to be evidenced in archaeological remains. Rather than using oral history to supplement archaeological interpretations post-excavation, Mønsted aims to let the oral history testify in its own right and challenge the archaeological record, prompting a reconsideration of current field methods.
In her dissertation (Copenhagen 2022), Mønsted examined Inuit stories documented in Greenland between 1735 and 1981. These stories shed light on the ideas and concepts Inuit connected to various...
Professor Sandberg’s research centers on questions of comparative media history and late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century visual cultures, including the intermedial history of literature, recording technologies, museum display, theater, and silent film. Throughout his career he has developed research specialties in Norwegian literature and cultural history (especially Ibsen and Hamsun), Scandinavian film history, literary and film historiography, and international forms of current serial television. Throughout much of his research, Sandberg has devoted attention to the ways in...
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 interests focus on the interface between vernacular Old Norse literature and the Latin tradition. He is particularly interested in learned literature, broadly defined, mythography, historiography, skaldic poetry, and Old Norse treatises on grammar and poetics.
His doctoral dissertation (Bergen, 2017) concentrated on Old Norse vision literature. Since then, he has published extensively on Medieval Scandinavian Literature. Common to these studies is that Old Norse texts are studied against the backdrop of a wider classical and medieval Latin tradition...