Dissertation project
Insults have been punishable by law for centuries in Sweden. Legal proceedings from historical sources record numerous accounts of cases involving defamation of character, and many of the judicial texts detail the cause of an insult, its formulation, and the effect on the listener. The primary material I examine in my investigation is excerpted from two different series of official proceedings from Uppsala in the 1600s: the university council minutes of Uppsala University and the judicial records of the city court. My investigation aims to illuminate sociolinguistic aspects of insults as speech acts in the historical material, examining their semantic and pragmatic dimensions. My analysis takes into account the form and meaning of the linguistic expressions as well as their power of insult and their effects on the persons addressed.
Research interests
Historical discourse analysis, historical pragmatics, speech act theory.
Departmental service
- Chair of the Doctoral Student Association 2007–2009
- Member of the Graduate Advisory Board 2007–2009
- Secretary, The Adolf Noreen Society 2008–
- Member of the Committe for Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Languages 2008–2009
- Conference secretary of Svenska språkets historia 11 in Uppsala 2010
- Member of the Departmental Committe for Equal Opportunity 2009–
Conferences
11th International Pragmatics conference, Melbourne, Australia, July 12–17, 2009. Paper: Verbal insults in a divided city. Historical speech act analysis.
Forum för textforskning, Södertörn and Stockholm, June 8–9, 2009.
The History of Swedish 10, University of Gothenburg, April 25–26, 2008. Paper: Verbala förolämpningar i 1630-talets Uppsala. En talaktsanalys inom historisk pragmatik (Verbal insults in Uppsala in the 1630s. A speech act analysis within historical pragmatics)
Language in History – History in Language, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, June 15–17, 2007
CV in brief
- Doctoral student in Scandinavian Languages, 2007–
- Senior high school teacher, Sigtunaskolan Humanistiska Läroverket, 1991–2006, leave of absence 2007–
- Senior high school teacher, Finnvedens gymnasium, Värnamo, 1989–1991
- Foreign lecturer in Swedish, Karl-Marx-Universität, Leipzig, 1988–1989
- Visiting graduate student, German, Karl-Marx-Universität, Leipzig, 1986–1987
- Senior high school teacher, Sigtunaskolan Humanistiska Läroverket, 1986
- Teacher Education degree, Swedish and German, Uppsala University, 1985
- Senior high school diploma, Humanities, Lundellska skolan, Uppsala, 1981
