Amanda Doxtater, doxtater@berkeley.edu

Amanda Doxtater is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Literature with a designated emphasis in film. She received her B.A.and M.A. degrees in Swedish Language and Literature from the
University of Washington. Before coming to UC Berkeley, she spent a Fulbright year in Stockholm researching representations of ethnicity in contemporary Swedish film. Her current academic interests have been informed, however, by an early friendship with an elegant young circus performer named Esmeralda (commonly held to be the most
beautiful woman in the world) who seduced her into the circus at a formative age. Traces of her years in Sweden as a tightrope dancer and snake charmer with Circus Schumann appear everywhere in her work. She is fascinated by representations of falling bodies, works with theories of seduction (circus and otherwise), and confesses to an infatuation with early, spectacle-packed Danish film. As part of her
dissertation research next year she hopes to explore narrative formulations of fantasy, seduction, lying and "the historical document" in Scandinavian literature and film. She also enjoys teaching Swedish language courses at Berkeley and coordinates a weekly film screening in conjunction with these courses.

Simon Helton, smhelton@berkeley.edu

Monica Hidalgo, mhidalgo@berkeley.edu

Verena Hoefig, verena@berkeley.edu

Molly Jacobs, mollyjacobs@berkeley.edu

Molly Jacobs entered the Department of Scandinavian in the fall of 2007. After receiving her B.A. in French and History from Xavier University in 2005, she spent a year teaching English in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. She received her M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto in 2007, where her focus of interest shifted from continental to Scandinavian literature. She explores the links and influences between continental and Old Norse literature, with additional interests in Old French literature, manuscript studies, and historical linguistics. Molly has jointly published a codicological article on Toronto Fisher MS 1269 and is currently working on another joint project, an edition of the life of St. Petronilla from the South English Legendary.

Dean Krouk, dnk@berkeley.edu

Dean entered the Department of Scandinavian in 2003 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. He completed his M.A. in 2005 with an emphasis on Norwegian literature and aesthetic theory. Dean studies 19th- and 20th-century Norwegian, Danish and Swedish literature, with an interest in intellectual history, narrative theory and the novel, and other topics pertaining to modernity in Scandinavian literature. Dean has presented conference papers about aestheticism and ethics in Kierkegaard and Ibsen, Knut Hamsun's novels and politics, and Adorno's reading of Kierkegaard. He has published articles about Hamsun's political reception and about the contemporary Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad. Dean's dissertation project examines intersections of modernist literature and fascism in the careers of three Norwegian writers from the period 1890-1940: Hamsun, Rolf Jacobsen, and Åsmund Sveen. He currently teaches Scandinavian 120, "The Novel in Scandinavian."

Suzanne Martin, suzanne_m@berkeley.edu

Suzanne completed the masters program in Scandinavian literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison after earning her degree in piano performance, and she entered the Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley in the Fall of 2005. An experienced chamber musician, she has continued
her interest in music through performances of Scandinavian music and the study of music in literature. As a Scandinavianist, Suzanne focuses on Swedish literature, themes of gender and sexuality, and Scandinavian and continental decadence. Suzanne has presented papers on Kierkegaard (2004) and on Mathilda Malling (2006) at the yearly SASS conference and has taught courses in composition for both the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently working with the writing of Kerstin Ekman, investigating the representations of Sami culture and of gender and sexuality in Ekman's recent work.

Benjamin Mier Cruz, bmier@berkeley.edu

Benjamin Mier-Cruz entered the Department of Scandinavian in 2004. After receiving his B.A. in German Language and Literature at Arizona State University in 2004, Benjamin received his M.A. in 2006 with a focus on Swedish and Finland-Swedish literature. He has presented lectures on Edith Södergran at Arizona State University as well as papers on Södergran, Friedrich Nietzsche and Pär Lagerkvist at SASS conferences. Benjamin studies 19th- and early 20th-century Swedish literature, particularly Carl Jonas Love Almqvist and August Strindberg, Finland-Swedish modernism, and German and Swedish poetry. Other interests include German expressionism and modernism, narrative theory, Ingmar Bergman, and gender theory. Benjamin has taught several Reading and Composition courses for the department. He also teaches Swedish language courses, holds Swedish film screenings and Swedish reading and discussion groups. Benjamin’s dissertation concerns androgyny and deifying Woman in the works of Södergran, Nietzsche and Almqvist.

Carl Olsen, carlolsen@hotmail.com

Carl Olsen has been a graduate student in the Scandinavian Department since Fall 2002. He received his B.A. from U.C. Santa Barbara in History and studied for a semester in Lund, Sweden before beginning at Berkeley. He completed his Masters in the Scandinavian department at Berkeley in 2005 with a major focus in Old Norse literature and a minor in Swedish folklore. He completed his qualifying exams in Fall 2006 with emphases in oral theory and Old Norse poetry, ekphrasis in skaldic poetry, and the figure of the Viking and Norse mythology in Swedish Romanticism. He is writing his dissertation on ekphrasis and skaldic poetry and is pursing dissertation research at Stofnun Árna Magnússonar in Iceland through the support of the Leifur Eirikssson Foundation. Carl has presented several times at the annual conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies and has recently written articles on Poetic Edda and Prose Edda for the Literary Encyclopedia (http://www.litencyc.com/). In addition to serving as a TA for a Scandinavian arts and literature survey course once semester, he has taught one year of Swedish language courses and several years of reading and composition courses for the department and in 2007 received the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award as well as the Teaching Effectiveness award.

Jeff Sundquist, jquist@berkeley.edu

After receiving his B.A. in Theatre from UCLA, Jeff Sundquist spent a few years exploring the world of academic librarianship. He received his Masters in Library Science and his Masters in Scandinavian from UCLA in June, 2003. He spent 2003-2004 as a Fulbright Scholar at the Statsbibliotek (State and University Library) in Århus, Denmark, where he worked as the Drama Librarian and authored the Library's Theatre Research pages- www.statsbibliotek.dk/emneguide/humaniora/teater. Currently, he is pursuing his Ph.D. in Scandinavian at UC Berkeley, enjoying many areas of study but focusing on contemporary Scandinavian theatre and film, and issues surrounding Nordic Librarianship. Jeff is the department's librarian and is using his professional knowledge and experience to restructure, revitalize and modernize the Scandinavian Library.

Ian Thompson

Elisabeth Ward, lissi@berkeley.edu

After formative visits to her mother's family in Iceland as a child, Elisabeth decided to major in Scandinavian as an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley, focusing primarily on the language and history of Iceland (B.A., 1994). She then studied anthropology at George Washington University, which introduced her to the myriad theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying culture. Upon completion of her M.A. in Anthropology with a Concentration in Museum Studies, she obtained a position at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, where she was the assistant curator for an exhibition entitled Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga from 1998 to 2003, and co-editor of the exhibition catalogue, which surveys the current status of our understanding of the Vikings westward migration across the North Atlantic and exploration of North America 1000 years ago. That experience convinced her to undertake Ph.D. studies that analyze the relationship between the past and the present, especially as it relates to Iceland's settlement period, saga accounts, archeological digs, nationalistic movements, and how the past is represented in museum exhibitions.