A few weeks back, a Post Graduate Conference was arranged in Lund – see this post for previous information. Here’s the summary from the organisers, including the message from us.
UCL Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Scandinavian Studies & Lund University Centre for Theology and Religious Studies have had the pleasure to host a postgraduate conference on Jewish Studies in the Nordics, in beautiful Lund with significant hybrid participation, this 16-17 September 2024.
The conference has received generous funding from the CEMES (Centre for Modern European Studies, University of Copenhagen) as well as Oscar och Signe Krooks stiftelse and Birgit och Sven Håkan Ohlssons fond.
We have gathered 14 postgraduate presenters and a total of 20 speakers from 7 countries, including various disciplines, levels of study, backgrounds and expertise – to share their work and foster an academic environment in our diverse, and fast-developing field.
On the first day, we had the pleasure to welcome Prof Lily Kahn, Head of Department at UCL Hebrew and Jewish Studies & Dr Riitta Valjärvi, Associate professor at UCL SSEES and Uppsala University, as keynote speakers. Lily and Riitta introduced language use among Jews in Finland.
On the second day, we had the pleasure to welcome Dr Jon Reitan, Associate professor at NTNU as keynote speaker. Jon presented his ongoing project on Jewish migration history from the Baltic shtetls to Norway in the late 19th century.
We have had a variety of sessions on studying, teaching, and publishing Jewish Studies in the Nordics, with an introduction to the journal Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies and the existing Nordic Jewish Studies Network.
We are positive about the way forward, and hope that the meaningful connections made over the last 2 days will result in exciting collaborations.
What happens next?
Nordic Jewish Studies network: we encourage you to check out the Nordic Jewish Studies Network website, where you can make a contribution by posting short blogs about your research journey, and advertise calls for papers: https://nordicnetworkforjewishstudies.com. Contact Desirée Lind for more information (de1304li-s@student.lu.se), and find her original message in the end of this email.
We plan to keep our community in the loop and update on similar initiatives, like conferences and publications in the future. When you are doing or coming across something relevant, do not hesitate to share with us.
At this stage, we are excited to bring to your attention a virtual seminar for researchers of Jewish Studies in the Nordic region, which is planned to take place in mid-November 2024. A seperate message with description will follow, please contact Paula.caceres@socwork.gu.se for more information.
Output: We are looking into the possibility of publishing papers from the conference in the journal Nordisk Judaistik. At this stage we can encourage you to think of this prospect for your work and keep your eyes open for possibilities.
Particularly, the topic of teaching Jewish Studies in the Nordic region has caught good interest during the conference. Those who wish may check with Matthew Johnson, Joanna Spyra and Maja Hultman regarding the possibility of producing an output for this topic.
We wish you all the best going forward!
Shabbat Shalom and god helg,
Noa and Magdalena.
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Desirée Lind’s message regarding the Nordic Jewish Studies Network:
“The Nordic Network for Jewish Studies is a research network for Jewish and Jewish adjacent studies in the Nordic region and/or regarding the Nordic milieu. We do this, primarily, through our website. The idea is to build a hub with short abstracts on the current research and create a network for researchers: the aim is to shine a light on what Jewish and Jewish-adjacent studies do in the Nordic region and to foster contact across institutional borders. Here is a link to the website (which is currently under redesign so please, mind the sparsity of it): https://nordicnetworkforjewishstudies.com/
So, I’d like to 1. do a shameless plug, i.e., please feel free to check it out and sign up for the network – it’s free! and 2: shamelessly use this platform to call for papers. The concept is fairly simple: the goal is to, once a week, publish an abstract of about 500 words. The form is fairly free, as long as it includes a title, contact information for the intellectual owner of the abstract (i.e., you as its creator), and said abstract. It serves mostly as a catalogue for current research to showcase and strengthen our research areas. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions!
We also make “ads” for events, so if you have information about a seminar, course, event, etc. that you’d like to get advertised, please feel free to reach out! In that case, I need a where (zoom events are of course also welcome), when (date and time), a short description of how and why (a few sentences on what it entails), and contact information for the one organising it. A picture is also appreciated, but not a must. This is, of course, completely free.
If I’ve missed anyone on this list or you have someone else in mind that you think would like to partake in this, please feel free to send this on to them: regardless if it’s a student or a professor, we welcome all contributions to showcase how diverse our field is. Of course, we take precautions to keep our Jewish fellows safe, which includes but is not limited to not publishing the exact places for events, not freely giving out contact information that is not consented to, and manually filtering through comments and other forms of contact.
Nordic Network for Jewish Studies 