Report of the President for the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study

Abstract

The main topic of the SASS president's report is usually the highly successful conference held the preceding year, but, as you all know, we were forced by the pandemic to postpone the conference scheduled for Rio Mar, Puerto Rico, until April 2022, which was a painful decision to make and one that we put off as long as we could, in the vain hope that there might be some quick way to get the coronavirus outbreak under control before it ravaged the entire world. Though fortunately a rarity, this wasn't the first time SASS has had to cancel the annual conference, the previous instances being 1933, 1943, 1944, and 1945. Those were largely wartime conferences, but the global struggle to bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control has required similar kinds of sacrifices in the spirit of solidarity, which we were glad to make to contribute to the safety of our communities. Many of our peer organizations cancelled their conferences outright, but the planning committee for the 2020 conference—headed up by Lill-Ann Körber, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, and Melissa Gjellstad—had done such a brilliant job connecting with local scholars, artists, and historians to ensure that our explorations of the theme “Postcolonial Entanglements” were grounded in this specific place, and foregrounded the lived experiences of Puerto Ricans and Caribbean peoples, that we couldn't bear to see all of that work go to waste. Instead, we were fortunate enough to be able to reschedule with the same hotel for April 26–30, 2022, at the same rates. Our keynote speakers, the artists Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle, agreed to stay on board, so we will be reprising the same conference theme, but with an enhanced awareness of the importance and obligations of our own global entanglements as a society and a scholarly field.Although the conference had to be put on hold, the life of the Society continued apace. We were not able to honor the recipients of our 2020 graduate student awards in person at the annual banquet as we usually do, so I am delighted to have the chance to highlight their accomplishments here. Robyn Barrow, of the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded the Aurora Borealis Prize in Arts and Literature for her paper “Consider the Walrus: Gunhild's Cross and the Nordic Trade Sphere,” while the Social Science award went to Claire Anderson of the University of Washington for her paper on “The Swedish Wild West's American Frontier: Nostalgia and Imagery in the Swedish Country Music Scene.” Troy Wellington Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, was selected to receive the 2020 Einar and Eva Lund Haugen Memorial Scholarship for his project on “Kierkegaard and the History of the Book and Reading.” Finally, the 2020–2021 Birgit Baldwin Fellowship was awarded to Tiffany White, University of California, Berkeley, for her dissertation, provisionally titled “The Demonization of the Natural World: An Ecotheological Exploration of Medieval Icelandic Literature.” The quality of these young scholars’ work gives me a lot of confidence in the future of our field and of the academy in general. It is a pleasure to be able to offer them some recognition and financial support at this early stage in their careers.As a result of not holding the annual meeting in 2020, we had to revamp the way the Aurora Borealis Prize competition would be held this year. In the past, nominations were restricted to graduate student papers as presented at the annual conference. To account for the unusual circumstances of 2020, we opened up the competition to all seminar papers submitted for a Scandinavian Studies course, both graduate and undergraduate. We received such an excellent array of submissions that the Executive Council decided to expand the awards categories to include an undergraduate prize, in addition to creating a third graduate student category in History and Area Studies, supported by a generous donation from the Society for Historians of Scandinavia (SHS), which decided to cease independent operations in 2020 and use the Aurora Borealis competition as a way of promoting outstanding scholarship in Scandinavian history.New members of the Executive Council are traditionally on-boarded at the council meeting immediately prior to the annual conference, which was another tradition we had to skip in 2020, but we were very pleased to welcome two new members to the council: Linna-Ly Roos, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the area of Languages and Literatures, and Verena Höfig, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the area of History and Social Sciences. The council is the backbone of SASS, making it possible for us to run an annual conference, publish a world-class journal, and not only administer the abovenamed prizes but also develop additional ways of supporting our membership and enhancing our field, such as SASS's newly announced book subvention program for both independent scholars and contingent and tenure-track faculty.The Society's journal, Scandinavian Studies, continues to be managed by editor Susan Brantly and book review editor Dean Krouk, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They weathered the pandemic with aplomb, producing four excellent issues in 2020. The first three issues contained, as is customary, a broad range of articles representing the many subfields of Scandinavian Studies with topics ranging from analyses of medieval sagas and works by such canonical authors as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Pontoppidan to racism in Sweden, pop songs, queer reading strategies, disability, and indigenous place names. Issue 4 was a special issue, guest-edited by Dean Krouk and Claus Elholm Andersen, devoted to the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, with the overarching theme “Beyond Autofiction.” Several of the contributions showcased a range of comparative approaches to Knausgaard's work, illuminating parallels and intersections between him and J. M. Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Marcel Proust, while the remainder explored themes including epiphanic experience, love, and terrorism.Since Susan Brantly's term as editor was supposed to come to an end in December 2020, the Society had launched a search for a new editor some time ago but without initial success. Susan agreed to extend her editorship for a few more years to give us the time to conduct a full search, which was successful the second time, and to allow for a smooth transition between editors. She will continue in her current capacity until mid-2023, when her colleague and the journal's current book review editor Dean Krouk will take over as editor. The journal is the public face of the society, so maintaining its excellence is a high priority for SASS. It is reassuring to know that it will continue to be in such talented hands.Behind the scenes throughout the pandemic, the executive officers, executive director, and executive council have been meeting frequently on Zoom and working hard to continue to professionalize SASS and ensure that we are following best practices in our financial dealings and how we interact with each other and with the world at large. Kimberly LaPalm's resurrection of News and Notes as a means of regular communication between the officers and the membership has worked wonders to help us maintain more open lines of communication, while our decision to hold an online conference in 2021 motivated us to partner with digital providers such as Cvent and Gather to ensure a seamless, intellectually stimulating, as well as psychologically empowering conference. The Society has undergone many rapid changes in the past few years, most of them very good, and we want to build on this momentum to ensure that the Society can continue to be a force for good in the field, the academy, and the world. We have recently adopted policies designed to ensure that our members and conference attendees will feel respected and safe, and we have been raising our voice as a scholarly society on relevant occasions to speak out in defense of our field, our members, and such values as equality, equity, and integrity. Despite the pandemic and the challenges it posed for us in many different ways, it was a pleasure and an honor to serve as president of SASS from 2019 to 2021. I look forward to many more years of productive engagement with all of you.