Scandinavian Program
People
Anna Westerståhl Stenport
Director of the Scandinavian Program
Office Hours Spring 2013: Monday 3-4pm
Office: 3109 FLB
Phone: 217-300-2681
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
Office: 3119 FLB
E-mail: malekin@illinois.edu
About Theo …
Theo Malekin did his PhD at Glasgow University’s Centre for Literature Theology and the Arts, where his research centered on August Strindberg. He subsequently drew on this research for his book Strindberg and the Quest for Sacred Theatre (Rodopi, 2010), which takes an interdisciplinary approach to some of the playwright’s later works.
His research interests include Scandinavian cinema; an ongoing engagement with August Strindberg; and more recently a new departure into Scandinavian children’s literature. He is also interested in the growing interdisciplinary engagement between consciousness studies and literature.
He regularly teaches courses on Viking sagas and Viking mythology and has also taught a number of courses on more recent Scandinavian literature and on film. He has also developed a new course on children’s literature and youth culture.
Mark Safstrom
Lecturer in Swedish and Scandinavian Studies
Office Hours Spring 2013: Wednesday 2-3:30pm
Office: 3117 FLB
E-mail: safstrom@illinois.edu
About Mark …
Dr. Mark Safstrom is Lecturer of Swedish & Scandinavian Studies in the Germanic Languages & Literatures Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His primary research interests are in the area of 19th and early 20th century Scandinavian history, with emphasis on the so called "folk movements" (the temperance movement, labor movement, and the religious revivals), as well as the history of Scandinavian immigration to North America. Travel accounts written by Scandinavians during this period have often featured in his research, which includes the age of polar exploration and cross-cultural descriptions between Scandinavians and various communities in North America.
Dr. Safstrom completed his PhD degree in Scandinavian Languages & 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.” He has written articles and conference papers on various aspects of Scandinavian travel literature, Scandinavian-American history, and Scandinavian Lutheran Pietism, two of which have recently been published in books collections:
“The ‘Waldenström Party’ in Swedish Politics 1868-1917; Interpreting the Political Activism of the Swedish Awakening” in “The Pietist Impulse in Christianity” (Wipf & Stock 2011).
“Writing History Together; Norwegian- and Swedish-American Historians in Dialogue” in “Friends and Neighbors? Swedes and Norwegians in the United States” (Minnesota Historical Society Press 2011).
Dr. Safstrom teaches courses in beginning and intermediate Swedish language 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. He has taught at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden as part of the INSPIRE exchange initiative. Together with several other collaborating partners at the U of I and KTH, Dr. Safstrom is involved in teaching and facilitating a joint summer course between the two universities called “Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic” with a field site component on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
Jensen Beach
Lecturer
E-mail: beach2@illinois.edu
About Jensen …
Jensen Beach completed his MFA in fiction at the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Prior to that, he received his MA and BA in English at Stockholm University. His research and teaching interests are mainly in contemporary and modern American fiction and poetry, Scandinavian literatures, and literature in translation. In his critical work and his creative work, he is particularly interested in how national (and international) identities are rendered in fiction. He has published short stories, non-fiction, and reviews most recently in the Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter, Sou'wester, Witness and many others. He is the author a collection of short stories called For Out of the Heart Proceed (Dzanc Books) and is currently working on two projects. The first is a book of linked stories set in Sweden that in part explores the intersection of historical narrative and fiction, and the second is a novel about Swedish involvement in the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 60s. He teaches courses on American Literature, writing, and Scandinavian Literature. He can be reached through his website at: jensenwbeach.com.