8 Connecting Ideas and Worlds

As a look at my annotated bibliography illustrates, from my time as a graduate student until now I have been invited to be a part of a number of academic projects, the majority of which focus on my work as a scholar of twentieth century and contemporary Scandinavian poetry. I have also been active at scholarly meetings, through leadership positions on professional organizations (MLA and ASTRA), through selection to be part of national summer seminars (the NEH), through commissioned translation work, and through outreach and engagement in the public setting through talks, interviews, panel discussions, and festival boards.

Most recently my article “Situating Lukas Moodysson’s Vad gör jag här” was published in the peer-reviewed print journal Scandinavica. Published in conjunction with the Department of Scandinavian Studies at University College London, it is one of two highly well-regarded peer-reviewed academic, international print journals that focuses on contemporary Scandinavian literary and cultural studies for an English-speaking, worldwide audience. I was invited to submit my article (an expansion of a conference paper) for this special edition of Scandinavica focusing on the work of Swedish filmmaker, writer, and poet Lukas Moodysson. My article on Moodysson was the only contribution in the journal dedicated to a his work as a poet. It situates his fragmented 78-page stream-of-consciousness book-length poem Vad gör jag här (What am I Doing Here) first in terms of trying to find a central narrative around which the poem is circling, and second in terms of considering the poem as a touchstone for Moodysson’s entire artistic oeuvre. The first ten pages of my English translation of Vad gör jag här immediately followed my scholarly article. My translation of the poem, in its entirety, is forthcoming from London-based Norvik Press.

My first piece of writing on Nordic poetry, on the twentieth century Norwegian poet Tor Jonsson, was published in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth Century Norwegian Writers in 2004. My invited article “By Land, by Sea, by Air, by Mind: Traversing Externally Internally in Finnish and Swedish Poetry” is currently under slight revision but will be forthcoming in volume two of the four-volume Comparative History of Nordic Literary Cultures series. A commissioned overview article on the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, is steadily taking shape; it is due to the publisher at the beginning of 2016. I am also beginning to return to revisions and slight expansion on a second piece of writing that began, like the Moodysson article, as a conference paper. Originally submitted to the editors for consideration in the edited volume Nordic Nature Cultures, it was accepted for inclusion with revision and expansion. The article is tentatively titled “Edith Södergran’s ‘Fragment’: Where Nature and Body Break Down,” and it marries my scholarly interest in modernist Nordic poetry with my theoretical interests in nature writing/literatures of place, poetics, the lyric, and phenomenology.

The Finnish poet Edith Södergran, on whom my contribution for the Nordic Nature Cultures volume focuses, was one of the three canonical twentieth century Scandinavian women poets on whom I wrote my dissertation. My expertise on Södergran led to me being asked last spring to review the most-recent monograph (of many) written and published about her; I recently completed my review of this book—the Finnish scholar Agneta Rahikainen’s 500-page Kampen om Edith, Biografi och myt om Edith Södergran (The Fight for Edith: The Biography and Myth of Edith Södergran)—for the peer-reviewed, print scholarly journal Edda, whose editorial offices are at the University of Oslo. I have also served as an anonymous reviewer of scholarly articles submitted to two leading, peer-reviewed international, scholarly print journals, Scandinavian Studies and Canadian Ethnic Studies.

I am currently working on three other projects that build off of my academic interests and areas of expertise. First, this fall I am beginning a commissioned translation of Swedish playwright, film director, and author Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander for first-time stage production in the U.S. My academic interest in and practice of translation began when I was an student at Gustavus. In the spring semester of 1998 I assisted Professor Roland Thorstensson with his translation into English of the Norwegian Sámi novel Saltbingen (The Salt Bin) by Frank Jenssen. I have worked professionally as a translator and continued academic training in the subject while a graduate student at UW–Madison in their Department of Comparative Literature. In July 2013, I was one of 25 scholar-practitioners of translation in the U.S., working in languages ranging from Arabic to Urdu, chosen to take part in the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar “The Centrality of Translation to the Humanities: New Interdisciplinary Scholarship,” held for three weeks at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois. I was recently asked and accepted an invitation from my NEH colleague, Dr. Mohammed Albakry, an award-winning translator of contemporary Egyptian drama and Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Middle Tennessee State University, to write an essay on the process of my translation of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. My article will be included in the volume Text, Context & Power Intersections in Translation: Multilingual Perspectives, which Dr. Albakry is editing. Second, I am completing the essay “‘A Living Home’: Conceptions of Childhood in the Paintings of Carl Larsson’s Sundborn” for the edited volume Nordic Childhoods 1700–1970: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

I have been nominated for and elected to positions of leadership in my field: I am currently serving my third year of five on the Executive Committee of the Discussion Group on Scandinavian Languages and Literatures of the Modern Language Association (MLA), and for two years I served as Member-at-large of the Executive Committee of the Association of Swedish Teachers and Researchers in America (ASTRA).

As my external evaluator, Dr. Claudia Bergson noted in her Third Year Review assessment, I am one of few scholars working in Scandinavian Studies beyond Scandinavia focusing on the fields Nordic poetry and translation studies. I have served as chair of conference panels focused on Scandinavian Poetry at the past three annual conferences of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. In these settings I was able to establish stronger connections and engage with colleagues from the Nordic countries, in the U.S., and elsewhere in the world who share this scholarly interest. I have chaired three other panels at the annual SASS conference, one panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, and I present at academic conferences on a regular basis.

Beyond my panel presentations and chair work at academic conferences I have also presented in public fora, including in September 2014, when I gave the invited public lecture “Images of Strindberg” at the American Swedish Institute (ASI) in Minneapolis in conjunction with Fotografiska’s (The Stockholm Museum of Photography’s) exhibit on the canonical Swedish author, playwright, and artist August Strindberg. In January of 2014, I was invited to be part of a panel discussion with Minnesota poet Ed Bok Lee, Minneapolis-based Coffee House Press publisher Chris Fischbach, and American Swedish Institute archivist and librarian Cassie Warholm-Wohlenhaus, that considered processes of translation most broadly and as they related to Bok Lee’s process and poems as part of his Coffee House Press in the Stack’s “Metatranslations” project at the ASI. At Gustavus I was a panel discussant for the College’s 32nd annual MAYDAY! Peace Conference on the topic of “Multicultural Sweden.” In honor of Tomas Transtömer’s being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011 and to commemorate his visit to Gustavus in 1972 I arranged a public talk and poetry reading. My scholarly engagement and knowledge has also helped provide me with the contacts and knowledge to host, engage with, and introduce while they are on the Gustavus campus and in venues in the Twin Cities, numerous scholars of Scandinavian Studies as well as Scandinavian writers, poets, and cultural critics.

As a scholar I have a strong desire to share what I know with not only my scholarly peers and my students but also the communities and world in which I live. In December 2012 I was interviewed by Kim Ode in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about shifting cultural practices and traditions among Minnesotan Scandinavian-Americans, and I frequently receive phone calls and emails at work from members of the public who are looking for help and guidance about things that range from providing names of translators who could translate old family letters from a Scandinavian language into English to the possibility of online courses for Swedish for adult and school-age children who want to learn the language. In my first year at Gustavus I was invited to serve on organizing committee of the then-annual Nordic Lights Film Festival in Minneapolis/St. Paul; it was a pleasure to promote the festival and the films to the greater Twin Cities/Minnesota community.

In closing, I feel it is important to note that there is extensive and overarching synergy between my teaching and scholarship. Just this past academic year, I developed and taught two new special topics courses for the first time both closely tied to my own scholarly work: the special topics courses SCA-344: “Nordic Poetry” and SWE-344: “Ingmar Bergman and His World.” I have previously taught a .5-credit independent “Translation Practicum” with a particularly talented language and literature student who had an interest in translation and also an ear for it; I have been encouraging her to keep her work up in this world, even as she enters into full-time work as a literacy specialist. In the future, I would like to offer a course on the practice and theory of translation as an IEX course open to students who have studied a second language on campus through at least the 200 level. I am excited for the upcoming scholarly phases, potentially post-tenure, and as I bring the projects at-hand to completion, to refine and define the directions I would like to take my scholarship. I have a continued interest in poetry, in translation, in women’s writing, and environmental writing. Also a growing interest, which perhaps has always been present and which drew me to focus on the study of poetry initially from the time that I decided to pursue my Ph.D., is an interest in everyday life. This interest was heightened after attending in March 2015 the Midwest Faculty Seminar on “Everyday Life” at the University of Chicago and engaging with scholars there who share an interest in and work on the subject. One of the beautiful and most meaningful, generative, inspiring aspects of teaching and being a scholar in the liberal arts is the ability to find and make connections between ideas and between worlds. These principles guide my work as a scholar as well as a teacher.