Category: Announcements

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NAHA’s Odd S. Lovoll Award Applications Open

The Norwegian-American Historical Association (NAHA) is excited to announce that applications are open for its Odd S. Lovoll Award, which recognizes originality, excellence, and creativity in undergraduate research and writing on any aspect of Norwegian-American studies.

The winner of the award will receive a cash prize of $500 and a one-year student membership in NAHA. Interested applicants should submit an interpretive essay based on original research of between 2,000 and 10,000 words in length, which conforms to Chicago style (using endnotes). Essays must be written as an undergraduate and submitted within one year of graduation from an undergraduate institution. Preference will be given to essays that explore previously neglected topics or new approaches to previously treated topics.

The award-winning essay will be considered for publication in NAHA’s academic journal, Norwegian-American Studies. The deadline for student submissions for the award is June 1 of each year. The NAHA publications committee, in consultation with the editor of Norwegian-American Studies, will select the winner. Award-winning essays will be announced September 1. For full details, please visit https://naha.stolaf.edu/publications/. Any questions can be directed to me, NAHA’s editor, at naha-editor@stolaf.edu.

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ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowships

Scholars of color, scholars from unconventional backgrounds, scholars working for change, and scholars enriching fields & institutions: please apply by Jan 12 9 pm Eastern!  Open to recent PhDs in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.  

For more information and to apply, visit the ACLS website here: https://www.acls.org/competitions/acls-emerging-voices-fellowships/

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Call for Panels: 5th Nordic Challenges Conference | Nordic Neighbourhoods: Affinity and Distinction in the Baltic Sea Region and Beyond

1 – 3 June, 2022 Södertörn University, Stockholm

In the past two years, neighbourly interactions have become a major challenge for countries, territories, and peoples. In the Nordic states as well as globally, the Covid-19 pandemic has amplified tendencies of bordering and political or social disengagement with the surrounding world. At the same time, efforts to curb the pandemic have given rise to new forms of virtual communication. The 5th Nordic Challenges Conference, organised as an on-site event by the ReNEW university hub, follows current developments and sheds light on the topic of Nordic neighbourhoods from various humanities and social science perspectives.

Panel proposals are expected to address recent schisms and rapprochement, or ingrained affinities and differences. Inter-Nordic relationships and Nordic entanglements with the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern and Central Europe, the EU, the UK, and the Arctic are of special interest to the neighbourhood theme of the conference. In addition, the 5th Nordic Challenges Conference offers a forum for any research dealing with the Nordic countries in an evolving world that fits under one of the ReNEW hub’s six research streams: 

– Nordic cooperation and region-building
– Democracy, governance, and law
– Public policy, gender equality, and labour markets
– Imagining Norden – branding and Nordic reputation 
– Multiculturalism and globalisation 
– Nordic culture, education, and media


Website: https://airpages.se/clients/fifthnordicchallenges/

Date Call Closes: 2022-01-08

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UCLA European Languages and Transcultural Studies 2nd Annual Graduate Student Conference

Call for Papers


In celebration of the newly-formed UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS), the graduate students of the former Departments of French and Francophone Studies, Germanic Languages, Italian, and the Scandinavian Section invite submissions to the 2nd Annual ELTS Graduate Student Conference.
Tensions between permanence and decay are constitutive features of European culture. Periods during which cultural and political conventions appeared as though they would endure have alternated with periods of crisis and widespread instability. There can be many interpretations of permanence and decay: they can refer to the physical nature of artifacts or materials and their durability, but also to the cyclical nature of thought (as the ideological crises in present-day Europe have brought to the fore), as well as to the unstable nature of social, interpersonal, and political frameworks (as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows us).
We seek to ask questions such as: How has the permanence of geopolitical and cultural borders reconstructed our understanding of history and its relationship to national or cultural identity? How have ideas of stability or change in literary canons shaped our cultural landscapes over time? How has our understanding of environmental and sustainability issues developed over time? Which cycles of permanence and decay can we identify in our natural surroundings, as well as their relationship to social, economic, and political norms? How have changing (or unshakeable) beliefs on sexuality, gender, birth, death, memory, and truth influenced each other and shaped European culture, literature, and politics?


We seek abstracts for 20-minute presentations that will explore these themes through any theoretical and disciplinary approach connected to Francophone, Italian, Germanic, and Scandinavian cultures. We encourage a variety of disciplinary angles including recent and emerging disciplines such as environmental humanities, digital humanities, and medical humanities.


In an effort to accommodate our local and international colleagues’ travel and health restrictions, as well as to be mindful of our environmental impact, the conference will adopt a hybrid in-person + online format (details will follow). In your application, let us know if you have a strict preference for either format.

Applicants are invited to submit a 250-word abstract of their conference paper by January 7th, 2022 to ucla.elts.conference@gmail.com. Acceptance decisions will be made known by February 28th, 2022.


Website: https://elts.ucla.edu


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Summer 2022 Field School in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula May 31-June 24

Michigan Technological University’s Department of Social Sciences will offer a field school in vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes this summer. The course, Barns and Beaches: People and Landscapes of Southern Houghton County, is a 3-credit hour immersive course open to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Join us along the shores of beautiful Lake Superior for an experience like no other!

Students will study cultural landscapes through multiple disciplines including history, folklore, and more. They will do community-engaged field research investigating Finnish American agriculture, logging, and vacation landscapes. 

The course experience will include one week camping at a field site in the Finnish logging and farming village of Toivola on the shore of Lake Superior where we will engage in historic site documentation, digital modeling, and oral history and ethnographic interviewing. Work produced during this field school will be used in the guidebook for the 2024 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference which will take place at Michigan Technological University in Houghton and the surrounding area.

The course will be co-taught by material culture specialist Dr. Sarah Fayen Scarlett (MTU), folklorist Dr. Hilary Virtanen (Nordic Studies, Finlandia University) and Dr. John Arnold (Historical Architect, Keweenaw National Historical Park). Students may enroll in either SS5800: Documentation or Historic Structures or SS4990: Special Topics in American History. The registration deadline is March 15, 2022.

For more information, contact Dr. Scarlett at sfscarle@mtu.edu.

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The American Council of Learned Societies Announces Third and Final Round of Emerging Voices Fellowship Competition 

Program supporting outstanding early-career humanistic scholars now welcomes applications for two-year posts with select ACLS Research Consortium Universities
The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to announce the third and final round of the Emerging Voices Fellowship program.

Following the success of the first two competitions of the program, which supports early-career scholars in the humanities and interpretive social sciences facing a challenging academic job market, both the competition and fellowship have been redesigned to best serve those who have received their doctorates just before or during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Emerging Voices Fellowship has been distinguished for its rapid response approach in supporting new and recent PhDs during a time of great economic uncertainty,” noted ACLS President Joy Connolly. “In addition to providing funding to help strengthen humanistic disciplines, we have also incorporated feedback from scholars and partner institutions from the first two rounds on how best to use our resources to make the program a success for everyone involved.”

For its final round of competition, the Emerging Voices Fellowship program invites applications from qualified PhDs whose voices, perspectives, and broad visions will strengthen institutions of higher education and humanistic disciplines in the years to come. Nominations are no longer required and will not be accepted. We welcome applications from scholars whose PhDs were conferred between January 1, 2018 through December 31, 2021. Students who anticipate receiving the PhD degree after December 31, 2021 are not eligible. Learn more in the Emerging Voices Fellowship FAQ.

Scholars of color, from low-income and unconventional backgrounds, and those who have taken on extraordinary roles in graduate school (organizing public art exhibits, teaching in prison education programs, coordinating research groups, to name just a few), are especially encouraged to apply.

The fellowship will now offer two-year in-person posts at participating institutions from the ACLS Research University Consortium during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years.

Applications are due Wednesday, January 12, 2022, 9 PM EST. 

Questions? Email us at EVFapplications@acls.org
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ACLS Webinar on K-12 Teaching

Please join us on Monday, December 13, 2021, at 4:00-5:30pm, for a career webinar for PhDs and graduate students on K-12 teaching (registration required)

ACLS will offer a virtual presentation for PhDs and graduate students to learn about teaching roles in K-12 schools from Carney Sandoe, the most well-known K-12 educational recruiting firm, and to meet people working in K-12 independent, public and charter schools.

We hope this will prepare anyone interested in applying to K-12 independent and charter schools for Fall 2022 teaching roles, which are advertised primarily in winter. Teaching at public schools is a less immediate option because of the hurdle of teaching certification, obtained as part of a teaching degree, but in case it’s of future interest, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from public school faculty during the virtual event.

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SASS Supports Black Lives Matter

The Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study wishes to express our outrage over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others, and to stand in solidarity with people of color who have been abused, oppressed, or murdered in the long and tragic history of white supremacy. Over the centuries, police brutality and racially motivated violence have played a key role in oppressing African Americans and other people of color in the United States. We condemn the systemic racism that pervades American culture and our criminal justice system and assert our strongly held conviction that Black lives matter.

As an academic organization, we acknowledge that the academy has often been complicit in white supremacy, and that hostility towards African Americans, indigenous peoples, and other people of color continues to pervade our academic structure. We commit ourselves to working to change that. We represent scholars dedicated to the study of the history and cultures of the Nordic region, an area of the world that is inextricably connected, both willingly and unwillingly, to the development of the inherent power structures that form the basis of inequity and injustice throughout the world. We acknowledge that it is our responsibility as scholars to pursue questions of race and inequality, seeking to expand the depth and breadth of our knowledge and to work to address these issues. We call on the members of SASS and colleagues across the Humanities to actively work to dismantle the systems of racism and oppression that not only pervade our country and the world, but also our universities, our research, and our classrooms. We can and must do better. 

For those looking to assist in the current moment, we provide a list of organizations that are taking immediate action to support the protestors who have been arrested: https://bailfunds.github.io/

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SASS 2020: Puerto Rico Rescheduled to 2022

Dear SASS members, friends, and 2020 conference participants,

As promised, SASS has closely monitored the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures being undertaken worldwide to mitigate it. Given widespread travel restrictions and the need to protect the health of both our members and the people of Puerto Rico, we regretfully announce that the Society’s annual meeting scheduled for April 29-May 2, 2020 in Puerto Rico has been cancelled.

We remain fully committed to dialogue about the repercussions of Nordic colonialism in the Caribbean, the cooperation with local scholars and artists, and the opportunities for networking and collaboration between Caribbean, Nordic, and American scholars that the conference aimed to foster. To that end, we have rescheduled the Puerto Rico conference for April 27-30, 2022 in the same venue, which will preserve much of the important groundwork that the conference committee has done.

Many of you have already made travel plans. All hotel reservations at the Wyndham Grand Rio Mar may be cancelled without penalty until 7 days before arrival, so please cancel. Airlines are accommodating the need to change tickets, so contact your booked air carrier to request compensation. Conference fees can be handled in three ways:

  1. Donated in full or in part to SASS;
  2. Donated in full or in part to an accredited Puerto Rican relief organization;
  3. Refunded back to the method of payment used when you registered.

Please indicate your preference on this Google sheet. Donations and refunds will be processed after May 15, 2020. We appreciate your patience and your support.

We are very sorry that we won’t have the chance to gather together as a society this year, but we hope to see you next year in Seattle and/or in Puerto Rico the year after. The 2020 conference committee, made up of Lill-Ann Körber, Melissa Gjellstad, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, and Troy Storfjell, has put in many hours of work to prepare this conference, cooperate with local artists and scholars, and put together a meaningful, balanced program. SASS is tremendously grateful for the work they have done to craft a conference that would model ethical, thoughtful engagement with the difficult topic of postcolonial entanglements and for their willingness to pick up these threads again for the 2022 annual meeting.

With SASS’s sincere hopes for your well-being and that of your communities,

Julie K. Allen

SASS President 2019-2021

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Julie K. Allen

Don R. and Jean S. Marshall Professor of Comparative Arts and Letters, Brigham Young University

President, Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study

Treasurer, Global Mormon Studies Research Network

Editor of The Bridge. Journal of the Danish American Heritage Society

Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Research Fellow at Goethe University-Frankfurt, 2019-2020

Brigham Young University

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Provo, Utah 84602