Ursula LindqvistFaculty

                                                                                  ON SABBATICAL 2024-25

Our college is located on the homeland of the Dakota people, who call this place Mni Sota Makoce (the land where the water reflects the clouds).

It is the power of the humanities to connect people--both to our innermost selves and to others who may be very different from us--that compelled me to become a lifelong student of languages, literatures, and cultures. Here at Gustavus, I'm a literature, film, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies scholar specializing in the Nordic and Arctic regions, and I've also taught Swedish language at the college level for two decades. I helped found the Program in Comparative Literature (my own Ph.D. field) and served as the founding co-chair (2021-23) of the President's Council for Indigenous Relations. 

Becoming a college professor was not my original plan. As a child I wanted to become a detective, and eventually I became a journalist, earning bachelor's and master's degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in the early 1990s. I worked as a newspaper reporter in the Arabian Gulf, India, and Central Florida for five years before deciding to change course and pursue graduate study in Comparative Literature, specializing in nationalist cultures, gender, and the poetics of resistance. I chose this field because my favorite courses in college were my comparative literature courses.

A dual U.S.-Finnish citizen, I grew up in Los Angeles speaking Swedish at home and spent many childhood summers in Finland’s Swedish-speaking coastal towns with my mother’s family. This led in part to my choice of Scandinavian Studies as one of my three areas of specialization for my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature (the others were French and African American studies). I conducted part of my dissertation research while a Fulbright Fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2000-01, and in my final year of graduate school I taught as a visiting lecturer in Swedish and Scandinavian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After earning my Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 2005, I held faculty appointments at the University of Colorado at Boulder, UCLA, and Harvard University (where I was Director of Undergraduate Studies for Scandinavian from 2010-2013) before joining the Gustavus faculty in Fall 2013.

Here at Gustavus, I've designed and taught many different Nordic studies courses, some of which also contribute to the curricula of our college's interdisciplinary programs in Peace, Justice, and Conflict studies; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; African and African Diaspora Studies; and Film and Media Studies. I love research and writing, and I have published three scholarly books: Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor: Contemplating the Art of Existence published in the University of Washington Press' Nordic Film Classics series; A Companion to Nordic Cinema, co-edited with Mette Hjort and published by Wiley-Blackwell; and New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society, co-edited with Jenny Björklund and published by Cambridge Scholars. (One of our Scandinavian Studies majors, Elizabeth Lutz '15, served as my indispensible copy editing assistant for both edited books.) I've been interviewed about Nordic filmmakers by NPR's Weekend Edition and the New York Times, and in 2015 I was invited as a keynote speaker on Swedish film by the Milwaukee International Film Festival. In January 2021, I moderated a webinar titled "Race in the Colonial Past and Present"featuring Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers and U.S. Virgin Islands artist La Vaughn Belle, who collaborated on the public statue "I Am Queen Mary" in Copenhagen's warehouse district. I have also served on the Executive Council of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS), the largest professional organization in the field, and as president of the Association of Swedish Teachers and Researchers in America (ASTRA). 

One of the best things about being part of the Department of Scandinavian Studies is our unique OUT OF SCANDINAVIA Artist in Residence endowed program, which brings an esteemed visitor from the Nordic region to Gustavus for an entire week to interact with our students and perform for a general audience. I've had the privilege of coordinating several of these visits, and the 2016 program--featuring indigenous Sámi musician and activist Sofia Jannok--inspired me to start looking for ways to connect our study of indigenous issues in the classroom to the real people and issues here today in Mni Sota Makoce. From 2018-2020, I was part of the Indigenous Relations Working Group, working toward reconciliation with the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, upon whose homelands our college stands. From 2021-24 I served on the President's Council on Indigenous Relations (PCIR). Since 2020, I've been conducting research with students in our Swedish-language archives to excavate a more complete and honest accounting of our college's settler history on Dakota lands.

STUDENTS: I am on sabbatical during 2024-25 and may not always be available for appointments (I'll be out of the country for all of October 2024, for example). When I am on campus, you can make an appointment with me by clicking here to select a time/date. Be sure to specify whether you'd like to meet in person or via Google Meet (online). Note that only currently enrolled Gustavus students should use this appointment system.

Courses Taught