Scandinavian Program
People
Anna Westerståhl Stenport
Director of the Scandinavian Program
Office Hours Fall 2011: Off Campus until January 2012
Office: 3109 FLB
E-mail: aws@illinois.edu
About Anna …
Anna Westerståhl Stenport pursued her undergraduate education and an M.A in Comparative Literature and French at Uppsala University, Sweden, and received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley (2004). Before joining the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Dr. Stenport taught Comparative Literature and Scandinavian Studies at UC Berkeley; she has also studied at the University of Georga in Athens, GA, and has lived in Victoria, B.C., Canada.
Anna is an Affiliate Associate Professor [Docent] of Literature at Gothenburg University, Sweden. She is a Beckman Fellow in the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study during the academic year 2010-11. She is affiliated with the European Union Center and holds zero-time appointments as assistant professor in Media and Cinema Studies, Comparative and World Literature, Gender and Women's Studies, Theatre, in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and Global Studies.
Anna’s research interests center on the two most recent turn of the centuries and Scandinavian, German, and French literary and geographical relations. Her book Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting is published with the University of Toronto Press (2010).
She has also co-edited a volume of scholarship on Strindberg and gender theory: Det gäckande könet: Strindberg och genusteori (Symposion 2006).
Currently completing a book on contemporary Swedish film director Lukas Moodysson, under contract with the University of Washington Press Nordic Film Classics series, her research involves a comparative analysis of the cultural geography of recent Swedish, Danish, and German film. This research is also part of the book New Nordic Cinema, which she is co-writing with Mette Hjort and Andrew Nestingen (advance contract with University of Edinburgh press).
Anna teaches courses on Scandinavian and European literature, film, culture, and drama; she has also taught courses on Crime Fiction, European decadence, German film, Old Norse prose narration, American Cultures, and post-colonial and feminist theory.
Recently, Anna was featured live on NPR, in the nationally broadcasted The Diane Rehm Show. There she participated in a panel on Stieg Larsson's best-seller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Click here to listen.
Read the article "Rebel Writer" about Anna's research on August Strindberg and gender studies, published in the University of Illinois College News: http://www.las.uiuc.edu/news/2007/strindberg/
Theo Malekin
Visiting Lecturer
E-mail: malekin@illinois.edu
I did my PhD at the University of Glasgow’s Center for Literature, Theology and the Arts where my research focused on broadly religious questions thrown up by some of the later plays of August Strindberg. Implicated in these questions were the seismic shifts in 19C European religious consciousness engendered by a mix of Darwinism, Biblical criticism and a growing awareness of the religious traditions of Asia. My interests remain interdisciplinary in nature, lying at the intersection of literature and the arts with broad intellectual and religious currents.
Mark Safstrom
Lecturer in Swedish and Scandinavian Studies
Office Hours Fall 2011: Wed. 2-3:30
Office: 3117 FLB
E-mail: safstrom@illinois.edu
Mark Safstrom completed a PhD degree in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2010. The title of his dissertation is “Religious Origins of Democratic Pluralism: Paul Peter Waldenström and the Politics of the Swedish Awakening 1868-1917.” His primary research interests are in the area of 19th century Scandinavian history, with emphasis on the so called "folk movements" (the temperance movement, labor movement, and the religious revival), as well as the history of Scandinavian immigration to North America. He has written articles on various topics in Scandinavian travel literature, Scandinavian-American history, and Scandinavian Lutheran Pietism, two of which are scheduled to be published in upcoming books collections:
“The ‘Waldenström Party’ in Swedish Politics 1868-1917; Interpreting the Political Activism of the Swedish Awakening” in The Pietist Impulse in Christianity published by Cascade Books.
“Writing History Together; Norwegian- and Swedish-American Historians in Dialogue” in Friends and Neighbors? Swedes and Norwegians in the United States published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Mark currently teaches courses in beginning and intermediate Swedish language for the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, having previously taught Swedish for three years at the University of Washington. He also teaches topics courses on Scandinavian literature in translation and Scandinavian culture and history.