February 16, 2024
This summer, MCLA English Professor Dr. Jenna Sciuto will spend three months in Iceland to examine transatlantic connections, gender dynamics, and saga realism in Icelandic feminist writer Svava Jakobsdóttir.
Sciuto is one of two international research fellows to receive the 2024 Snorri Sturluson Icelandic Fellowship through The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. The program is open to writers, translators, and scholars in the field of humanities from outside Iceland to enable them to stay in Iceland for a period of at least three months, to improve their knowledge of the Icelandic language, culture, and society.
Sciuto had previously applied to the fellowship three times after discovering the opportunity through her Icelandic Collaborator Haukur Ingvarsson, with whom she co-founded the Nordic Faulkner Studies Network.
“I’m very excited and honestly this year I almost didn’t apply,” she said. “It just shows that you never really know. Sometimes you spend months on something that you pour your heart into it, and other times you only have the spark of a new idea, but that’s the year you get picked. I’m super grateful and excited.”
Sciuto spent time in Iceland during the fall 2021 semester to research her latest book while on sabbatical and returned again in the summer of 2022. Her new book, that she finalized in January, is titled Peripheralized Norths and Souths: Colonial Liminality, Representation, and Intersecting Identities in US Southern and Icelandic Literatures (forthcoming, University Press of Mississippi).
During her upcoming fellowship, she will examine the work of twentieth-century Icelandic writer Svava Jakobsdóttir in the context of her historical moment and transatlantic connections. The project will explore Jakobsdóttir’s range of references and influences, from gender relations and the US military presence to medieval texts like Hávamál in the Codex Regius and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda.
Sciuto has presented research connecting William Faulkner and other US Southern authors to Icelandic writers through the lens of colonial liminality and Whiteness studies at invited talks in Denmark, Iceland, and the US, as well as two international online symposiums organized in France and the UK and conferences throughout the US. Her research connects to her teaching, as demonstrated by the roundtable “Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies: Social Justice & Community Engagement in the Classroom” that she chaired at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention. She has been named an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow for 2021-2022.
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