Seminar "Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries in Viking Age Studies"

On Thursday, 15 September 2022, Daniel Sävborg will give a talk called "Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries in Viking Age Studies". The seminar will take place in Lossi 3-406 at 18:15. The seminar is also a book launch for the volume Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries in Viking Age Studies, edited by Daniel Sävborg and published in August 2022.

A short presentation of the lecture:

«What happens when scholars cross the disciplinary boundaries? What problems are there when a scholar uses the material from one discipline to interpret the material from an entirely different one, and how should the problems be solved? Interdisciplinarity is a prestige word in the academic world of today. It is praised in declarations and requested in announcements. But the implementation of interdisciplinary research has often been met with severe criticism – especially the attempts to combine written sources with archaeological material – which indicates that it in practice offers difficulties. Material, methods, research issues and lot least traditions are often of very different kinds in different disciplines. In a new book, I have collected a number of articles that all attempt to discuss and handle the problems of interdisciplinarity in Viking Age studies in different ways and to find solutions to the problems with the purpose to gain new knowledge on the basis of genuine interdisciplinary combinations. The authors come from different disciplines – philology, history, archaeology, literary studies, folklore studies and history of religion – and have different perspectives and ideals. An aim is to stimulate to new interdisciplinary research based on scientifically more secure methods than before and thereby develop Nordic Viking and Medieval studies. Another aim of the volume is to bridge the deep gap which is often at hand between excellent scholars from different disciplines, whose works on similar topics do not go into dialogue with each other. In my lecture, I will discuss the basic methodological problems with interdisciplinary research and how they might be solved.»

More information about the book can be found here: https://www.brepols.net/products/978-2-503-59296-1

Everybody is welcome!

The Pre-modern seminar is an interdisciplinary and informal seminar at Tartu University organized by the Department of Scandinavian Studies and led by Professor Daniel Sävborg. It was founded in 2010 and has so far arranged 51 meetings with talks by scholars on different levels, both from Estonia and from abroad. The focus is on pre-1800 issues of all kinds.