The Spirit of Place
Johnson 102

Lene Tranberg is the principal partner of Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects, one of the most influential architecture firms practicing in Denmark today. Her office produces exemplary work at several scales, from lighting design to building in the urban context of Copenhagen and other Danish cities. Recent work includes a student dormitory for Copenhagen University (Tietgenkollegiet), the Copenhagen Business School (“Kilen”) in Fredericksberg, and the Playhouse for the Royal Danish Theater located at Nyhavn. These buildings have received numerous prizes in Scandinavia and Europe including a prestigious RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architecture) Award for the Playhouse this past June.

Link to this event

Pre-Dissertation Colloquium with Kirstine Kastbjerg
Raitt 314

Danish Gothic has gone unexamined despite canonical writers’ frequent and consistent use of Gothic conventions, renegotiated for a Danish context. Gothic conventions of evil, decay, fragmentation, perverse desire, supernatural spectacles, and sensory disorientation represent an onslaught of destructive forces, threatening to demolish the modern subject as it emerges in Romanticism. Ingemann, Andersen, Blixen and Høeg engage with nineteenth-century Danish discourses of identity and self formation, using the excesses of Gothic surface mechanisms, theatrical effects and cheap thrills to articulate ideas about the production of identity that ties into the Gothic aesthetic and ontology of the present day.

Link to this event

Toward a Walkable Seattle: Drawing on International Examples
Architecture 147

Danish architect Helle Søholt will present a series of recommendations for improving the pedestrian experience within Seattle. Drawing from experience in cities around the globe, Ms. Søholt will illustrate the relationships between urban walkability and vibrant public life.

Helle Søholt is a founding partner at Gehl Architects, a firm renowned for its influence on urban life and public space. Gehl Architects’ unique methodology uses empirical survey and mapping methods to measure the human experience of urban space, and applies these lessons to their urban design solutions. Ms. Søholt has extensive experience consulting on international urban design projects. She has taught both Urban Design Theory and Studio Work, and is a frequent lecturer and keynote speaker. She received a MA in Architecture and Urban Design from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark as well as a MArch from the University of Washington.

Link to this event

Consul Erik D. Laursen and the Nordic Heritage Museum invite members of the Seattle community to meet a twenty-member delegation of Danish legislators from the Regions Capital.

The delegation is visiting the Seattle area to study regional development, technology transfer and commercialization.

Guests will have an opportunity meet and mingle with the visiting legislators at the reception.
Following the reception guests will be treated to a catered dinner and presentations from Marianne Stecher-Hansen, Professor of Danish Studies at the University of Washington and Consul Erik D. Laursen, KGL Dansk Konsulat. Stecher-Hansen will deliver a lecture “Nordic Connections in the Pacific Northwest” and Consul Laursen will present “Cultural Comparisons: Examples from the US and Denmark”.

Link to this event

Architecture Hall 147

Bicycle Transportation in Portland: A Tale of Three Cities
Roger Geller
Bicycle Coordinator, City of Portland

There’s More to Walking Than Walking: Design for Copenhagen’s Public Realm
Louise Grassov, MAA
Associate, Gehl Architects - Copenhagen, Denmark

Walkable Design for a Sustainable Dockside Green
Jim Huffman, MAIBC, LEED A.P.
Associate Principal, Busby Perkins + Will - Vancouver, Canada

Discussion Moderator:
Anne Vernez Moudon, Dr. es Sc.
Professor, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Washington

This panel is part of Global Green: Sustainable Planning and Design in the Pacific Northwest and Denmark.

Link to this event

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. Søerine, a female dwarf from Denmark, is given as a gift to the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, during his visit to Copenhagen. Søerine travels to St. Petersburg where she becomes a jester at the Tsar’s functions. She enjoys her new life and falls in love with the Tsar’s favorite dwarf, but disaster strikes in the shape of a priest who wants to “save” her.

Fogtdal speaks in Jan Krogh Nielsen’s class on Scandinavian Literature.

Link to this event

Movie Showing and Lecture

Christiania: Our Heart is in Your Hands tells the story of the “free state” of Christiania, a 36-year-old anarchist squatter community occupying an abandoned military base in the heart of Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen.

After the movie showing there will be a question and answer session with the movie’s producers Richard Jackman and Robert Lawson. The Q and A session will be led by Marianne Stecher-Hansen.

More Information: Nordic Heritage Museum

Link to this event

Conversation on the Environment: Denmark and the Pacific Northwest

Svend Auken, former Danish Minister on the Environment

Link to this event

The Royal Danish Guards Association - Pacific Northwest & UW Dept. of Scandinavian Studies present:

A Royal Birthday Celebration
honoring
Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark

Saturday April 19, 2008
Hosted bar from 6:00 p.m.
Dinner at 7:00 p.m.
Dancing until 11:30 p.m.
Black Tie Optional

Link to this event

Cinematic Counter-Globalization in a Small-Nation Context

In Small Nation, Global Cinema, Hjort argues that the emergence of the New Danish Cinema in the course of the ’90s can be traced to various strategies of counter-globalization aimed at thwarting the workings of what Miller et al. refer to as ‘Global Hollywood.’ She suggests the successful globalization of the New Danish Cinema hinges on, among others, a strategy of counter-globalization rooted in what Greg Urban calls ‘meta-culture.’ The Dogma 95 movement, devised by filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, is a clear instance of this strategy.

This lecture examines more closely the meta-cultural strategy (which involves framing specific cinematic works in terms of manifestos or rules) so as to draw attention to the crucial role that key individuals (rather than State-driven initiatives) can play in processes of counter-globalization. Hjort argues that individuals make a difference when they self-consciously refuse the more than likely possibility of ultimate success in what Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook call ‘winner-take-all-markets’ in order instead to generate the dynamics of a gift culture that effectively transforms, and thereby psychologically expands, the small-nation context. In an effort to refine and substantiate this view, Hjort looks closely at Lars von Trier’s most recent attention-grabbing project, the collaborative experiment with veteran filmmaker Jørgen Leth, entitled The Five Obstructions (De fem benspænd, 2003).

Hjort is Professor of Intercultural Studies at Aalborg University and a Visiting Research Associate at Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Program.

Link to this event

New Realism in Scandinavian Film and Television: A Response to New Digital Media and 3-D Spatiality

In 1995, Danish director Lars von Trier initiated the Dogma-95 manifesto along with Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh Jacobsen and Kristian Levring. The four directors each made a film following the Ten Commandments of Dogma’s “Vow of Chastity,” which proscribes artificial light and sound, postproduction image alteration, as well as many other devices used to “mask” or alter reality and strengthen film’s illusion. Since 1995, thirty-five films have been produced around the world according to the Dogma program. The international press has interpreted Dogma as a protest against the digital mega-productions of Hollywood. What is rarely noted about Dogma’s aspirations towards a new realism is that it also includes an ambition to influence the senses of the audience, rather than to present only a “hand-held” version of everydayness, a phenomenological reading of the world in the style of Italian Neorealism or the French New Wave.

The films of Dogma-95, and especially von Trier’s contribution, as well as his other 1990s films, present a realist expressionism that seems to attack the audience. Aesthetic values are pushed towards the realm of ethics. This lecture proposes a new reading of this new realism, focusing on von Trier’s creation of a perceptible space between screen and audience in The Idiots (1998), spatial multiplicity in Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancer in the Dark (2000), and a mix of theatre space and computer-simulated space in Dogville (2003).

Link to this event

The Belligerent Gaze: Witnessing at War

Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at UW. He has published books on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1999) and on Beckett’s Ontic Space (2001), as well as articles on literary theory, the ontology of fiction, and the European avant-garde. He is currently working on a large-scale study of the relation between politics, aesthetics, violence, and democracy in the twentieth century, ranging from Italian Futurism to the war in the former Yugoslavia and contemporary forms of terrorism.

Link to this event

Sense Studies and Madsen’s Genspejlet

Kerstin Bergman, Ph.D. (Lund University, Sweden)

Link to this event

The Art of Writing Posthumous Papers:
The Great Earthquake of Søren Kierkegaard Revisited

Poul Behrendt (University of Copenhagen, Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley) speaks on his current book project on Kierkegaard. Professor Kim Andersen of WSU has been invited to serve as the respondent to the lecture.

Link to this event