The Tsar’s Dwarf

Danish author Peter Fogtdal comes to Seattle to talk about his new book The Tsar’s Dwarf, which has been translated into English by affiliate faculty member Tiina Nunnally. Fogtdal will speak on Tuesday October 21st at 1:30 pm in Loew 106, as part of Jan Krogh Nielsen’s class on Scandinavian Literature. The event is free and open to the public.

Fogdtal will also be speaking at Elliot Bay Books at 2pm on Sunday October 19th, and the Nordic Heritage Museum at 7pm on Monday October 20th.

The Power of Scandinavia

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, the Department will participate in The Centennial Series: Beyond the American Point of View with a lecture by Professor Christine Ingebritsen.

A century ago, the young University of Washington was growing and reaching out to the world, not only with the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held on campus in 1909, but also with two new academic departments: Scandinavian Languages and Department of Oriental History, Literature, and Institutions.

Those two departments, each with a single faculty member in 1909, have since expanded and transformed to become four College of Arts & Sciences departments: Scandinavian Studies, Asian Languages and Literature, Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. The Centennial Lecture Series highlights these departments with presentations and panel discussions featuring the UW’s renowned faculty.

All four celebrate their centennial anniversary in 2009. Register for this free event, which will be held in from 7-9pm on November 12th in Kane 120.

Staging Migration and Post-National Identities:
The Performance of Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Europe

Iranian-Swedish playwright and director Farnaz Arbabi discusses the performance of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Europe. Arbabi’s talk will be held in Communications 202.

In the past couple of years her work has awakened political and cultural debate and secured some of Sweden’s most prestigious theater awards. In her 2006 adaption of the literary classic The Emigrants, she recasts Vilhelm Moberg’s epic of 19th-century immigration to America as a narrative of today’s immigration to Sweden. Her production of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s play Invasion! (2006) deals with questions of ethnicity and identity among first-generation young people whose parents immigrated to Sweden.

In 2007, she produced Normal for Camp X theatre in Copenhagen, a devised work about sexuality and sexual identity among teenagers. This year, she directed the musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch for Stockholm City Theatre. In her talk, Arbabi will show filmed clips from her productions and discuss recurring themes in her work: identity, ethnicity, gender, and alienation among minority groups in contemporary Europe.

The Seattle Times profiles a house designed by Peter Cohan, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department. Cohan also has an abiding interest in Scandinavian architecture. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study architecture in Sweden in 1986 and is the director of an 8-week travel study seminar to Scandinavia, which is offered every third summer.

The University of Washington Press series, “New Directions in Scandinavian Studies,” will publish three books this year:

Andrew Nestingen, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Film, Fiction and Social Changeexplores the changing nature of civil society in Scandinavia through the lens of popular culture.

Joan Templeton, Munch’s Ibsen: A Painter’s Visions of a Playwright, draws on a mass of printed and archival material to provide a comprehensive account of the relationship between the two great Norwegian modernists, Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch.

Terje I. Leiren, Selected Plays of Marcus Thrane, presents six translated plays from the Norwegian-American Theater of Norway’s nineteenth-century political radical, Marcus Thrane. Published with the Norwegian-American Historical Association.

The co-General Editors of “New Directions in Scandinavian Studies” are Christine Ingebritsen and Terje Leiren, faculty members in the Department.

The purpose of the UW Swedish Club is to promote and celebrate Swedish language and culture at the University of Washington and the surrounding community. The Club holds weekly fika meetings throughout the school year and special events from time to time, which include IKEA visits, Nordic Heritage Museum visits, movie nights, and more. The Club is involved in the annual Lucia pagent through the Swedish Cultural Center.