Nordic Heritage Museum

The 2000s saw a burst of literary creativity in Sweden, as young authors—many of them second-generation immigrants—began writing their own stories, set in a diversifying society where citizens with many different ethnic backgrounds were making claims to full-fledged Swedish identity. Doctoral candidate Peter Leonard will will explore the imaginative fiction of Khemiri, Wenger, and Bakhtiari for hints of a new, “post-ethnic” Nordic identity in this talk as part of the Museum’s Wallenberg Lecture Series.

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Criminalizing the Johns to Protect Victims of Prostitution:
Meet the Architect of Sweden’s Controversial Sex Law to Discuss its Consequences and Effects
Women’s University Club

Co-sponsored by the Center for Women and Democracy. Registration and dinner reservation required online.

Margareta Winberg is the former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Secretary of Labor and Minister of Gender Equality Policies. Her lecture is part of Empowerment — Swedish Style: The Pippi Longstocking Effect, sponsored by the Swedish Institute in Stockholm and SAS Seattle.

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Why Men and Women are More Equal in Sweden:
Proactive Policies in Swedish Legislation and Society
Smith 120

Margareta Winberg is the former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Secretary of Labor and Minister of Gender Equality Policies. Her lecture is part of Empowerment — Swedish Style: The Pippi Longstocking Effect, sponsored by the Swedish Institute in Stockholm and SAS Seattle.

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Katharsis for Two-Year Olds: From Aristotle to the Puppet Theatre Tittut
Thompson 125

Do very small children really enjoy and benefit from live theatre performance? Does a 2-year old get anything out of seeing, e.g., Little Tiger and Little Bear? Stockholm’s Puppet Theatre Tittut thinks so—and they have 30 years experience to prove it. Sweden’s forward-looking culture policy recognizes the central role played by art and literature in the development of very young children. Find out in what special way theatre benefits its youngest audience members and how you can help enrich the lives of the children in your world.

Anne-Charlotte Harvey is Professor Emerita of Theatre at San Diego State University and an acclaimed singer, actress, and translator.

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Since 1948, students in the Scandinavian Department have performed a Luciatåg (Lucia procession) to celebrate the beginning of the holiday season. Join us this year for a special Lucia Concert on Friday, December 5th at 2:30 PM in room 108 in the Husky Union Building (HUB) on campus. This event is free and open to the public. Coffee and refreshments will be served following the concert. The event is being sponsored by the Scandinavian Department and the UW Swedish Club.

This year, the concert will feature an impressive 43-voice choir of students from Södra Vätterbygdens Folkhögskola in Jönköping, Sweden, as well as the members of the UW Swedish Club who will perform the Luciatåg. All students interested in participating in the Luciatåg should contact Swedish Club president, Sarah McConkey.

A note on the tradition: Lucia celebrations are held in many places in Scandinavia on Dec. 13th, Lucia’s saint day. The tradition of a girl wearing a crown of candles on her head is full of symbolism, most notedly the theme of the return of light at the darkest time of winter (Dec. 13th was the winter solstice on the old Julian calendar).

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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 with members of Lotta Gavel-Adams’ Drama seminar.

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.

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The Architecture of Private Life: Strindberg’s The Roofing Ceremony and the Modernist Novel

Anna Westerståhl Stenport is assistant professor of Swedish and Director of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Her publications include studies of August Strindberg, Swedish cinema, and Swedish popular fiction.

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From a Cold War to a Cold Peace. Time for a Revival of Disarmament?

The Department of Scandinavian Studies and the Alumni Association were honored to welcome Swedish diplomat Dr. Hans Blix to campus for a guest lecture on October 18th. Now you can view Blix’s speech, From a Cold War to a Cold Peace. Time for a Revival of Disarmament? online in streaming and downloadable video. Blix underscores the impact of our current political climate on world affairs and feature his insight and expertise regarding instituting change via weapons control.

Born in 1928 in Uppsala, Sweden, Dr. Blix’s career has largely been in politics and public service. From January 2000 until June 2003, he was appointed Executive Chairman of the United Nations Mentoring, Verification and Inspection Commission for Iraq by the UN Secretary-General. In early 2004, Dr. Blix chaired the independent international Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. He has received several honorary doctorates, is the recipient of many decorations and awards, and has written numerous books on international and constitutional law and articles relating to energy and the problems of the spread of nuclear weapons.

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Prize-winning Swedish author Heidi von Born visited the Department of Scadinavian Studies and Ia Dübois’ second-year Swedish class on May 11th, giving an overview of books recently published in Sweden.

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Is the Swede Human? Radical Individualism in the Land of Social Solidarity

In this talk, Trägårdh & Berggren will discuss their book “Är svensken människa?” which claims that the supposedly socialist Swedes are, in fact, individualists in extremis. At the heart of the Swedish social contract lies a deeply rooted conception, what the authors call “a Swedish theory of love,” according to which authentic love and friendship is only possible between individuals who are independent and equal. This moral logic, joining the ideal of independence to those of economic equality and social solidarity, has been institutionalized in modern Sweden through the radical alliance between the individual and the state, which the authors term “statist individualism.”

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Sweden’s Desperate Hunt for Diversity

Marjaneh Bakhtiari
Author and Critic

From the courtyards of multiracial housing projects to the backseats of immigrant-driven taxis, never have Swedish journalists been more eager to depict their nation’s new demographic reality. But what assumptions about religion, culture and language lie hidden behind this newfound obsession with multiculturalism?

Bakhtiari’s debut novel, Kalla det vad van du vill (Call It Whatever You Like), chronicles the lives of two Malmö families, Irandoust and Sundén, who meet when their two teenagers begin dating. In scenes alternately absurd and touching, Bakhtiari shines the spotlight on both “new” and “old” Swedes alike.

• Critique of “Mohammeds Taxi”, a TV program about integration


• Analysis of state radio’s outreach efforts in Rosengård

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Sweden and Europe and the Era of Globalization: How are Europe and Sweden Performing?

Gunnar Lund
Swedish Ambassador to the United States

Ambassador Lund will speak in Christine Ingebritsen’s International Political Economy course.

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The Evolution of the Modern State

Steinmo (University of Colorado, Boulder) examines the ways Sweden, Germany, Japan and the US have responded and adapted to the pressures of globalization, demographic change and the decline of public trust. He also introduces insights drawn from evolutionary theory and suggest that there is much to gain from this approach to improve our understandings of political and institutional change. This talk will focus on the case of Sweden.

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New Music by UW Student Cónan Mclemore

Three Poems of Vesaas, a sonata for flute & piano commissioned by Ed Egerdahl for the 25th anniversary of the Scandinavian Language Institute and based on three poems of Tarjei Vesaas: Vårlukten, Slik Var Den Draumen, and Gjennom Nakne Greiner.

Concertino for Alto Saxophone (a musical re-telling of Helge Kjellin’s Swedish fairy tale Leap the Elk and Little Princess Cottongrass.

Brechemin Auditorium (Music 128)

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Ecological Man and the Laponia World Heritage Site

Hugh Beach is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Cultural Anthropology & Ethnology, Uppsala University, Sweden. His extensive body of research includes: Saami (Lapp) and Circumpolar Studies, Pastoralism, Minority Politics, the Social Effects of the Chernobyl Disaster, the “Politics of Ecology” (Global Environmentalism and Indigenous Rights). Sponsored by Program on the Environment and the Department of Anthropology

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Lunacy, Political Arrogance, and Nationalism: Eighteenth Century Scandinavian Music in a Nutshell

Bertil van Boer is a musicologist, composer, conductor and violinist. Van Boer (Western Washington University, Bellingham) specializes in Scandinavian music of the 18th century. His own compositions have been performed in Austria, Sweden, US, Nicaragua and served as conductor with the Opera Kansas.

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Leading researchers from Seattle and Sweden will present state-of-the-art studies & promising new developments for children and adolescents with diabetes.

Bell Harbor International Conference Center
2211 Alaskan Way Seattle, WA 98121

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Cross-Dressing: Concepts of Gender and Self in the Films of Ingmar Bergman

Marilyn Johns Blackwell, Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Director of Swedish at Ohio State University, earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1976. She is the author of three books on Swedish literature and film (Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman [1997], Persona: The Transcendent Image [1986], and C.J.L. Almqvist and Romantic Irony [1983]), and she is the editor of Structures of Influence: A Comparative Approach to August Strindberg [1981]. In addition to her books, Dr. Blackwell has published widely in North American and Scandinavian journals on Strindberg, Ibsen, Bergman, Vesaas and Dinesen. A distinguished literary scholar and popular teacher, she regularly teaches courses on the films of Ingmar Bergman and Scandinavian literary topics. The Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington is proud to welcome Dr. Marilyn Johns Blackwell back to the UW campus as the first distinguished alumni lecturer.

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Eighteenth-Century Stockholm in American English

Paul Norlen, Ph.D.
Affiliate Assistant Professor

Regarding Some Problems Translating Ernst Brunner’s First-Person Novel about Carl Michael Bellman.

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Nature and the Authorities as Artistic Material

Lars Vilks
Sculptor and Professor of Art Theory, Bergen National Academy of the Arts

Article on Vilks (in Swedish):
Lars Vilks om sparandets konst

Svenska Dagbladet
September 8 2004

Part of Modern Vikings

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Going Baroque: August Strindberg on Science and the Visual Arts

August Strindberg is regarded as a founding father of modern drama. In the groundbreaking plays To Damascus, A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata he develops an innovative dream-poetics that had a profoundly influenced later writers and directors. Paradoxically, the radical modernism evident in these plays and other writings is built on archaic and anti-modern premises. In the 1890s, Strindberg abandoned fiction and began experiments in chemistry, alchemy, photography, and optics, seeking to develop an interdisciplinary total science. This work is arguably a conscious attempt to reject the scientific paradigm for a regression to archaic, medieval and baroque ideas about God, nature, man and his place in the universe. In this talk, Balbierz (Jagiellonian University in Krakow) reconstructs Strindberg’s scientific theories and show how he uses modern media such as photography to create an aesthetics that is both modernist and neo-baroque.

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Photography by Eva Sköld Westerlind on view at the Nordic Heritage Museum Dec 2 2004 through Jan 2 2005

Born in Nyköping, Sweden, Westerlind currently lives and works in Kirkland. A graduate of the Photographic Center NW, her work has been published in numerous journals and magazines.

Underwritten by the Scandinavian Initiative for the Pacific Northwest, Western Canada,
and Alaska.

Photo from the series Solitary Traveler

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Mikael Niemi will discuss his best-selling novel Popularmusik från Vittula, recently translated into English.

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Kids, Trolls, and the Environment in the Picture Book World of Elsa Beskow

Part of Modern Vikings: The Scandinavian Initiative for Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and Western canada, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers

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Nurturing the Natural: Children and the Environment in the Nordic Picture Books

An exhibition at Pacific Lutheran University and The University of Washington. Curated by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, New York.

Sept 15 to Oct 29:
Scandinavian Cultural Center
Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma

Nov 3 to Dec 30:
Suzzallo Library
University of Washington, Seattle

Part of Modern Vikings: The Scandinavian Initiative for Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and Western canada, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers

Image: Anna Höglund Hjälp!, skrek trädet (Help!, shrieked the tree), 1991

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