1989 Birgitta Steene (University of Washington), "From August Strindberg's The Son of a Servant to Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Lantern: The Autobiographical Mode in Scandinavian Literature"
1990 Gitte Mose (University of Copenhagen), "The Fantastic in the Swedish Novel after 1978"
1991 Rochelle Wright (University of Illinois), "America through Song: Scandinavian Emigrant Ballads"
1992 Tutti Soila (Stockholm University), "The Ideological and Cinematic Break of the Swedish Cinema in the 1960s"
1993 Elina Haavio-Mannila (University of Helsinki), "Friendship, Love, and Sexual Harassment in the Workplace"
1994 Sven Steinmo (University of Colorado), "Can the Swedish Model Survive?"
1997 Jan Ojvind Swahn (University of Lund), "Swedish Food Customs"
2000 Concerts by The Rilke Ensemble
2001 The Night Walkers By Kristina Lugn, Translated from the Swedish by Verne Moberg
A Staged Reading Directed by Robert Greer, Featuring Yvette Edelhart and Meg Gibson. With an Introductory Talk by the Translator About the Author and the Play
Biographical Notes The Playwright: Kristina Lugn often writes about the tragicomic lives of women who are approaching psychic collapse, and The Night Walkers (Nattorienterarna) fits this description, depicting a meeting of two women schoolteachers while out at night walking. It opened to sell-out audiences in Stockholm in the spring of 1998, featuring the distinguished actresses Pernilla August and Lena Endre (known for their fine work in films by Ingmar Bergman and others). The play was reviewed very favorably in Sweden and has won several prizes there.
Ms. Lugn is the author of a dozen other plays, including one entitled The Stolen Jewels, which is scheduled for a future re-opening of one of the stages at the Royal Dramatic Theater. Her best-known play, Aunt Blossom (Tant Blomma), was featured in the Nordic Theater Festival at Columbia University in 1995, also in a translation by Verne Moberg and under the direction of Robert Greer. Other Lugn plays that have been given as readings by Moberg and Greer at Columbia are Hour of the Dog (a.k.a. The Gymnasts), The Old Girls at Lake Garda, Silver Star, and Ruth and Roger. The author is also a favorite poet in Sweden, with seven volumes of verse to her credit. Like her plays, her poems often deal with lives of loneliness, absurdity, and tragicomic despair.
Kristina Lugn has been awarded many prizes, including the Swedish Theater Critics' major prize for innovation in Swedish drama in 1999, Stockholm Landsting Theater Prize in 1998, the Moa Martinsson Grant in 1998, the Fritjof Nilsson Piraten Prize in 1997, Expressens Björn Nilsson Prize (for literary criticism) in 1996, the Karl Vennberg Prize in 1995, a Swedish Academy Prize in 1994, the Society of the Nine (Samfundet De Nio) Literature Prize in 1994, City of Stockholm Culture Prize, 1994, the Swedish Theater Biennale in Malmö, Sweden in 1993, 1994, and 1995, Riksradions Poetry Prize in 1991, and Svenska Dagbladet's literary award in 1983.
Lugn has been featured in acting roles in some productions of her work and has also carried on the stage tradition of distinguished Swedish actor Alan Edwall by working together with his children to continue operation of Brunnsgatan Fyra, the small theater he developed in Stockholm. In addition, she is known as a prolific and respected literary critic.
The Translator Verne Moberg is a Swedish-American teacher, translator, and editor and has taught Swedish and Scandinavian literature at five universities, including Columbia. She has translated a number of other works by Kristina Lugn that have been done at Columbia as staged readings under the direction of Robert Greer. She produced the Nordic Theater Festival '95 at Columbia University together with Robert Greer and Aili and Austin Flint and last month presented a commemorative program at Deutsches Haus for the Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson. Dr. Moberg was awarded the Inger Sjöberg Prize in 1997 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation and recently received a prize from the Swedish Academy.
The Director Robert Greer produced Viveca Lindfors's In Search of Strindberg both at Actors Studio and at the Strindberg Festival in Stockholm and (together with Verne Moberg and Aili and Austin Flint) produced Nordic Theater Festival '95 at Columbia University. He has directed the English-language premieres of plays by Kristina Lugn and Edvard Rønning in the translations of Dr. Moberg, as well as (in New York, Los Angeles, and Stockholm) the plays of Mario Fratti and Anthony Swerling; August Strindberg and Anne Charlotte Leffler; Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Corneille; Elizabeth West Versalie, Rose Nalbadian, Karen Pinkus. Robert Greer directed staged readings of Spellbound and Theories, two plays by Victoria Benedictsson, in last month's Victoria Lives! program at Deutsches Haus. He teaches at City University of New York.
The Actors Yvette Edelhart (Bibi) is active in all phases of acting. She has played many and varied roles, from Mrs. Pearce in My Fair Lady, Mrs. Chichester in Peg O' My Heart, Betty Meeks in The Foreigner, and the mother in Night Mother. She has had principal roles in Kate and Allie, Law and Order, and Another World. This is her third appearance in a reading of a Kristina Lugn play.
Meg Gibson (Vera) has performed all over the country in theatre, film, and television. Her work stretches from Shakespeare to Shawn. In New York City, her home for the last twenty years, she graduated from the Juilliard School and has premiered work with the Public Theater, the Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwright's Horizons, BAM's Next Wave Festival, EST. She just finished shooting the film Dust. Her association with Mr. Greer began with ballet class.
2002 Two Lectures On Swedish Theater And Film By Swedish Theater And Film Historian And Translator Leif Janzon
Exorcising On Stage: Ingmar Bergman's Theater Since 1942, Ingmar Bergman's stage work in Sweden has been both controversial and celebrated. First seen at major theaters outside Stockholm, from the sixties at the Royal Dramatic Theater and at the Royal Opera, his productions have since the eighties also visited the USA. Leif Janzon has followed his work closely since the sixties and shows the continuous interaction between his theater and his films and TV productions, with "the Bergman actors" as an important common denominator. Bergman's work is also considered in its cultural, social, and biographical context. Cosponsored by Film and Video Studies.
The Smile Of Garbo: The Emigrant One of the most fascinating and elusive film stars of our times, Garbo rose early to cult status. Née Greta Gustafson from the poor South Side of Stockholm, she – like so many Swedes before her – became a US emigrant. To most Swedes, Garbo's is not a mysterious, but an easily comprehensible Swedish fate, one among hundreds of thousands of compatriots, who out of poverty, ambition, and dreams, were forced to leave their physical and spiritual home. Her professional and private life is seen by Leif Janzon as emblematic of Sweden's social transformation since the late 19th century.
Biographical Notes Leif Janzon (b. 1944) has written extensively on modern Swedish theatre (in Swedish and English), and been a lecturer at several universities, both in Sweden and internationally. He is a librettist; his recent works include the opera "Trädgården" (The Garden; music Jonas Forssell), about Swedish scientist Carl von Linnaeus; and the musical "Kejsarinnan" (The Empress; music Mikael Wiehe), based on Selma Lagerlöf’s novel "Kejsaren av Portugallien."
He is also a translator of novels, plays, musicals, essays and poetry. Among writers translated are Norman Mailer, William Faulkner, Seamus Heaney, James Purdy and Arthur Koestler.
2003 Scandinavian Chamber Music Concert #1 Faculty and students, including Soren Hermansson, Erling Blondal Bengtsson, Eric Ronmark, and the School of Music Chamber Choir, conducted by Jerry Blackstone.
Visions of Northern Sounds Meet Maestro Eric Ericson, leading choral conductor of our age in a film portrait by Peter Berggren. Followed by a talk lead by the director.
Scandinavian Chamber Music Concert #2 Featuring School of Music faculty and students, including Megan Besley accompanied by Steve McGhee.
The Poetic and Beautiful Scandinavia An exhibition of photography by Merete Blöndal Bengtsson
2004 Ideas of Wealth and Welfare in Sweden and the USA
David Östlund, historian and Fulbright-lecturer from Stockholm University speaks two Thursdays in March, in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Conference room, Modern Languages Building, third floor, 4-6 PM.
"Social Engineering": From Benevolent Business Efficiency to the Experts' Welfare State "Social engineering" became a catchword among American progressives in the interwar period. In recent decades it has often been used with reference to Swedish society as the epitome of the rationally planned welfare state. The concept was originally launched in America in 1899, referring to a kind of expert-guided benevolence on the part of Big Business, seen as a partial solution to "the social question". This origin has immediate links to the group of Swedish "progressives" who shaped the first foundations of the Swedish welfare state in the start of the 20th century. Both contrasts and similarities with American thought shed new light over the Swedish way from "social war" to "social peace".
The Swedish Model: Soft-Socialism or Vigorous Capitalism with a Human Face? Since the 1930s Sweden has often appeared as a symbol in international debates. Cherished as an enviable ideal society by American left-liberals, Sweden has also been painted as a dystopia by conservatives. What gave this small country on the northern fringe of Europe its reputation to possess a unique "model"? Conspicuous economic prosperity? Cultural traits of modernist-rationalistic consensus? A comprehensive social security system? Were such features rooted in ancient national traditions and mentalities? Were they on the contrary a result of pure chance in the interplay between a unique set of social forces, such as a strong and autonomous business community? Or was the "People's Home" an edifice built by the Social Democrats, using their governmental power 1932-1976 to materialize the ideas of reformist socialism?
2005 was not held
2006 Two Lectures of Swedish Interest: The Making of Equality: Social Processes and Swedish Experiences and The Union of Europe: From Europeanization to Global Ambition and Global Subservience
By Göran Therborn, Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala, and University Professor of Sociology at Uppsala University.
2007 was not held
2008 A Swedish Theory of Love: Radical Individualism in the Land of Social Solidarity” presented by Lars Trägårdh
This event was inaugurated in 1989 in honor of Signe Karlström and her family, who are great benefactors of the University of Michigan’s Scandinavian Program. Professor Trägårdh's most recent book claims that the supposedly “socialist” Swedes are individualists in extremis; devoting themselves to the pursuit of personal autonomy—unimaginable even in the U.S.
