PhD, Senior lecturer

Lectures and Seminares

My primary field of teaching has been within dialectology, language history, grammar, academic writing, university education and translation. I'm a member of the mentor group at Uppsala university and on request I supervise students at advanced level.

Research Areas

I'm primarily interested in dialectology, language history, ethno-biology/-zoology, cultural history, grammar and academic writing.
My doctoral thesis from 1996 concentrates on popular bird names, i.e. popular names of snipes. Thereafter, I have written some popular articles on this subject but also carried out a diacronic study of the local Swedish name for magpie (skjura 'skata'). I have also performed a study of 18th century Swedish in a local dalecarlian calendar from 1799.
Since 2006 my interest in 18th century Swedish has continued with research on the language of one of Linnaeus' apostles, Anders Sparrman, and his letters to Carolus Linnaeus in 1771-1776. On several occations I have presented papers on this subject. In May, 2011, my book on Anders Sparrman's letters to Carolus Linnaeus was published incl. a linguistic, socio-cultural and biological commentary. Simultaneously, I participated both as an organizer and lecturer in a symposium (financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) called "Anders Sparrman revisited" in Uppsala. The symposium was financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) and hosted by Uppsala university, Linnésällskapet and SCAS in cooperation.

Ongoing Projects

While studying Sparrman's letters I also made a thorough transcription of his later published travel accounts (1783, 1802, 1818), adding up to approx. 500 pages (letter format). The corpus was used in the study of Sparrman's colloquial language in letters compared to the later revised language in his publications. Hopefully, I will in the future be able to publish this entire corpus incl. a linguistic, socio-cultural and biological commentary.
Currently, my interest in different varieties of written 18th century Swedish has widened into the field of vernacular literacy. In addition to Sparrman, I have therefore chosen some particularly interesting apostles born in different areas of Scandinavia in order to perform a comparative study of the language in their letters to Linnaeus. In June, 2012, I plan to participate in a conference in Umeå on this subject.