EXECUTIVE COUNCIL ORGANIZATION
The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study is a membership organization with over 500 members worldwide – ranging from graduate students and faculty to institutions and organizations with an interest in promoting Scandinavian Studies. The chart below outlines the organizational structure of SASS. For more details about each position and how you can become part of the SASS leadership team, click on the box.
OFFICERS
The SASS Executive Council is headed by four Executive Officers. Click on the titles below to learn more about these positions and our current representatives.
PRESIDENT
The President serves a two year term in which they function as the Chief Academic Officer of the Society. The President provides academic leadership to the society as well as providing oversight over the society’s fundraising activities and acting as the liason between SASS leadership and the conference organizing committees. Immediately following their two year term, the President transitions into the role of Financial Officer.
Andrew Nestingen
Andrew Nestingen is professor of Scandinavian Studies and adjunct in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington. He has served as department chair since 2015. He is author and editor of Transnational Cinema in a Global North (2005, co-edited with Trevor Elkington) Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia (2008), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (2011, co-edited with Paula Arvas), The Films of Aki Kaurismäki (2013), and Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation (2020), co-edited with Linda Badley and Jaakko Seppälä. He served as review editor of Scandinavian Studies from 2014 to 2019.
VICE PRESIDENT
SASS members elect a Vice President in alternating years. The VP serves a two year term in which they function as the Chief Operating Officer of the Society, overseeing the awards and prizes committees, and serving as the chair of the Birgit Baldwin Fellowship committee. Immediately following their two year term, the Vice President transitions into the role of President.
Scott Mellor
Mellor is distinguished faculty associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has worked in this capacity for over twenty years. He works mostly in Medieval studies and folklore. He has published a book on an oral-formulaic analysis of poems in the Poetic Edda and articles on such various topics as the Life of Saint Ansgar, ballads, and Hans Christian Andersen. His ongoing project is on folk culture on the Åland Islands. Mellor is the current president of the Association of Swedish Teachers and Researchers in America (ASTRA) and is co-editor of a volume on Finland-Swedish culture for Journal of Finnish Studies.
FINANCIAL OFFICER
The Financial Officer serves a two-year term in which they function as the Chief Financial Officer of the Society. The Financial Officer oversees the work of the Executive Director as regards the banking and investment interests of the society. In addition, the financial officer chairs the audit committee.
Julie Allen
Professor Allen works on questions of cultural identity in 19th, 20th, and 21st century Northern Europe, particularly with regard to literature, religion, silent film, and migration. She is the author of Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes & Asta Nielsen (Univ. of Washington Press, 2012) and Danish but Not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850-1920 (Univ. of Utah Press, 2017)
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
The Executive Director is the only full-time SASS employee. They function as the Chief Executive Officer of the Society, overseeing the day-to-day operations of the organization, including financial oversight, managing membership, and all internal and outward-facing communication. The Executive Director is responsible for ensuring that the Society follows all applicable government regulations for non-profit organizations, as well as the regulations and by-laws set out in the SASS Constitution.
KIMBERLY LA PALM
Kimberly has served as the Executive Director of SASS since 2019. She holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literature from UCLA and her research focuses on performance and adaptation in the Nordic region from the late medieval period until today. Her dissertation, Uncovering Performance in Medieval Scandinavia, explores the forgotten history of performance in the north prior to the Reformation.
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
The Executive Council is made up of ten members, representing the fields of Languages and Literature, History and Social Sciences, and Institutional/Independent and Graduate Student Members. Graduate Student Representatives serve a two year term while the others serve a four-year term, with at least two new members rotating in at the end of the annual conference. During their term on the council, members fullfill the role of a board of directors. They serve on committees, propose new initiatives, and vote on proposals concerning the management of the society. The Executive Council meets virtually twice a year in January and September, and in person at the annual meeting in May.
4TH YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
Kate Heslop
Kate is an Assistant Professor in the Scandinavian Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She grew up in New Zealand and received her doctorate from the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on Old Norse topics, with special interests in poetic materiality and mediality, memory studies, and the senses. Her monograph "Viking Mediologies" is forthcoming with Fordham in 2021.
3RD YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
Amanda Doxtater
Amanda Doxtater is the Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies in the University of Washington Department of Scandinavian Studies. Her research interests include: film melodrama, Nordic art cinema, performance and translation studies, design-thinking, and public-facing scholarship in the humanities.
2ND YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
Liina-Ly Roos
Liina-Ly Roos is Assistant Professor in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in Nordic and Baltic cinema, television, literary and cultural studies. Her research interests include hierarchies of migration; figurations of the child; memory studies; public broadcasting and film theory. Roos has published on imagining the post-Soviet trauma in Nordic cinema in Baltic Screen Media Review (2014) and her chapter on melodrama, childhood and Nordic cultural memory of war is forthcoming in Nordic War Stories (ed. Marianne Stecher).
1ST YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
Rosemary Erickson Johnsen
Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Ph.D. is Associate Provost and Associate VP of Academic Affairs at Governors State University, near Chicago. Also a professor of English, she publishes in the areas of crime fiction and public humanities, including Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan). She is co-editor of a forthcoming essay collection on Public Scholarship in Literary Studies (Amherst College Press, 2021), and a recent recipient of 2 NEH grants. A regular presenter at SASS conferences and book reviewer for Scandinavian Studies, she has published essays on Swedish crime fiction in the Los Angeles Review of Books and other public-facing outlets. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Culture. Her vision for service to SASS includes promoting public humanities engagement among individual members and for SASS as a whole. External collaborations and relationships will enhance the reach and stability of SASS. (www.rosemaryj.com)
HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
The Executive Council is made up of ten members, representing the fields of Languages and Literature, History and Social Sciences, and Institutional/Independent and Graduate Student Members. Graduate Student Representatives serve a two year term while the others serve a four-year term, with at least two new members rotating in at the end of the annual conference. During their term on the council, members fullfill the role of a board of directors. They serve on committees, propose new initiatives, and vote on proposals concerning the management of the society. The Executive Council meets virtually twice a year in January and September, and in person at the annual meeting in May.
4TH YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
3RD YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
Anna Rue
Anna Rue is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A graduate of UW-Madison’s Scandinavian Studies PhD program, Rue researched Norwegian-American folklife with an emphasis on folk music. She continues this work through the Sustaining Scandinavian Folk Art in the Upper Midwest project, an interdisciplinary project involving instruction, public outreach, public events, and fieldwork collection throughout the Upper Midwest.
2ND YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
Verena Höfig
Verena Höfig (PhD '14 Berkeley, SASS member since ’08) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research focuses on the intersection of literature, material culture, and social history in Scandinavia from the Viking Age until today. Recent publications include articles on healing practices in the pre-Christian North, and on radical Neopaganism and the alt-right in the United States. Her first book (under contract) focuses on nationalism in Iceland. She teaches courses on Old Norse-Icelandic language and the sagas, Norse mythology, and modern Swedish language and culture.
1ST YEAR REPRESENTATIVE
Tim Frandy
Bures! Frandy is an Assistant Professor of Folklore Studies at Western Kentucky University, where his research involves Nordic and Nordic American folklore (mostly Sámi and Finnish), Indigenous peoples, and public humanities. He is serving on the Executive Council to advocate for two issues that are dear to him. The first involves elevating diversity in our field: in our membership, the Nordic communities we work with, and the kinds of scholarship we do. The second concerns supporting graduate students and younger scholars facing historic economic challenges. The future of our field depends on our investment in these two issues.
INDEPENDENT & GRAD STUDENTS
The Executive Council is made up of ten members, representing the fields of Languages and Literature, History and Social Sciences, and Institutional/Independent and Graduate Student Members. Graduate Student Representatives serve a two year term while the others serve a four-year term, with at least two new members rotating in at the end of the annual conference. During their term on the council, members fullfill the role of a board of directors. They serve on committees, propose new initiatives, and vote on proposals concerning the management of the society. The Executive Council meets virtually twice a year in January and September, and in person at the annual meeting in May.
INSTITUTIONAL/INDEPENDENT REPRESENTATIVE
SALLY YERKOVICH
Yerkovich is Director of Educational Exchange and Special Projects at The American-Scandinavian Foundation and Adjunct Professor of Museum Anthropology at Columbia University. A cultural anthropologist with more than thirty years of leadership experience in museums and cultural institutions in New York and Washington, DC, she now serves as the Chair of the Ethics Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). She is the author of A Practical Guide to Museum Ethics as well as numerous articles on ethical issues. Yerkovich would bring to the SASS Executive Council the perspective of an independent scholar working in the non-profit sector.
GRADUATE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE
MAXINE SAVAGE
Maxine Savage is a doctoral student in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. As a graduate student member of SASS’s executive council, their focus would be on recruiting and supporting a diverse graduate student presence in the field. Maxine’s research explores national identity, queer history, racialized affect, and materiality in contemporary Icelandic literature and cinema. Their scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in lambda nordica, PARSE journal, Ós, seedings and elsewhere. Supported by the Fulbright Commission and the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Maxine’s work has included collaborations with the Northwest Film Forum, Taste of Iceland, and The Poetry Brothel Reykjavík.
STANDING COMMITTEES
Aurora Borealis Committee
Birgit Baldwin Fellowship Selection Committee
Haugen Fellowship Selection Committee
Audit Committee
Professional Behavior Committee
CURRENT AD HOC COMMITTEES
Policies and Procedures
Strategic Planning
Communication
Journal Business