Mikael Males - Biography#

I have a rich record of publications for my stage in the career: 35 scholarly articles, three peer-reviewed monographs and two edited volumes, all peer-reviewed. I have held invited lectures at 11 universities in Europe and the United States. I have been member of the editorial board of Collegium Medievale (Norwegian, peer-reviewed journal of medieval studies) since 2017 and Són (Icelandic, peer-reviewed journal of medieval and modern poetics) since 2016. I have organised or co-organised a range of international conferences, symposia and PhD-courses at the University of Oslo and elsewhere. I have been PI of two three-year research projects, and I have received two awards for my scholarship: Kungliga Gustav Adolf akademien’s prize from Dag Strömbäck’s fund in 2018 and the Norwegian Royal Gold Medal for outstanding PhD dissertation in the humanities in 2012. I have a solid network of distinguished scholars in Europe and the United States.

I specialise in Old Norse poetry, but with a background in Classics and Celtic philology I also explore the relationship between these traditions and the Old Norse one. I have collaborated with scholars of Classics and Celtic for more about a decade. I have explored both the early, predominantly pagan period and the influence of the school curriculum in a later, Christian setting. A major concern of mine has been to devise reliable methods to explore the early period in particular, since that methodology has remained underdeveloped.

I have considerable teaching experience on BA, MA and PhD level, not only at the University of Oslo, but also in Iceland, Italy and the United States. I have also engaged in public outreach, and two recent pieces may be found here: https://www.podplay.com/no-no/podcasts/tru-og-meining-i-gammal-tid-1020841/episodes/87-havamal-samtale-med-norronfilolog-mikael-males-539760369 https://www.forskning.no/historie-litteratur-sprak/professor-norge-har-en-hedensk-arv-a-vaere-stolt-over/2460347.

My two monographs in Swedish constitute compromises with regard to outreach, conveying new scholarly insights but being written in a manner accessible to the educated public. This choice is partly motivated by my ambition to support the survival of high-quality scholarship in Europe’s smaller languages and partly by the fact that the level of expertise required for informed study of Old Norse and Early Germanic poetry is becoming increasingly rare, also within the Academy.

This last point has increasingly come to occupy me in recent years. In collaboration with colleagues who share my concern, I have organised summer schools in Old Norse and early Germanic metrics and poetics, since updated and well-informed courses of this kind are vanishingly rare world-wide. A collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Iceland is now in place in order to safeguard the continuation of this initiative, and thus the preservation of these crucial competencies for future scholarship.