Registration for SASS 2019 is still open! Follow this link to register:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/ss/renew_cf.html

Conference Rates:

Late Registration Rates (April 1-): Regular Members $300; Student Members $150

(includes the Banquet!)

On the registration page you will also be able to sign up for:

• Lunches for Friday and Saturday ($25 each; menus listed on site);
• Free Indigenous Tour of the University of Wisconsin campus, Thursday May 2
  Indigenous Tour of UW Campus
• An optional pre-conference excursion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin ($70) Thursday May 2—includes lunch!
  Pre-Conference Frank Lloyd Wright Tour
• A Friday-night (May 3) Wisconsin Beer, Wine and Cheese Happy Hour ($30)
  Happy Hour Wisconsin Brews & Cheese
• The conference banquet is INCLUDED in your registration fee!  It will be a buffet featuring local Wisconsin foods and beef, chicken, and vegan entrées.

This year’s conference will take place May 2-4, 2019,  in the heart of downtown Madison WI, on the shores of Lake Monona. We will meet in the Monona Terrace Convention Center, designed by local architect and luminary Frank Lloyd Wright. The conference theme “Closing the Frontiers?”  is highly relevant when dealing with contemporary Scandinavia. Frontiers are borders – real and imagined, present and historical. Scandinavia, like the United States, is a place where previously open borders have started to close. This holds not only to those trying to enter as immigrants or refugees, but also to those wishing to move within the once open Nordic region. “Closing the Frontiers”  raises the question of what and whom to include when talking about Scandinavia – today and in the past. The question mark in the title indicates our openness to explore all aspects of the theme from all angles, encouraging a dynamic interdisciplinary discussion.

Madison is extremely well situated to discuss the question of the “Closing the Frontiers?” Frederick Jackson Turner, famous for his “Frontier Thesis” of 1893, was a professor of history at UW-Madison. Richard Hartshorne, who drew up the boundaries between the different sectors of a divided Germany after WWII, was a professor of cartography at UW-Madison. Rasmus B. Anderson, popularizer of Leif Erikson as an explorer of the New World, was a professor of Scandinavian Studies at the UW-Madison.  He founded a department of Scandinavian Studies in 1875—the first such department in the United States, and arguably the first such in the world. With the recent merger of that department into a wider Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic, we want to ask the provocative question of whether this a closing of a frontier or an opening of new opportunities, new collaborations, and an important step away from an idea of Scandinavian exceptionalism.

Streams

Several streams will be featured in the conference:

Ibsen’s Frontiers, organized by the Ibsen Society of America;

Normativity and Transgression in Medieval Scandinavia, organized by Christine Ekholst (Uppsala University), Sean Lawing (Bryn Athyn College), and Keith Ruiter (University of Aberdeen);

Nordic Art // Global Contexts, organized by Elizabeth Doe Stone (University of Virginia), Isabelle Gapp (University of York) and MaryClaire Pappas (Indiana University)

New Frontiers in Language Teaching: The Nordic Languages, organized by Peggy Hager (University of Wisconsin – Madison)

There will also be a conference-within-the-conference entitled Sustaining Scandinavian Folk Arts in the Upper Midwest which will feature a number of Nordic and American artists working within Nordic traditions of material culture.  Your SASS registration will entitle you to attend any and all sessions, including a full day of live demonstrations. Watch the SASS site for more details as the conference approaches!