Into the storyworlds
Love at the Borders: An Interview with Cameron Cross
This autumn semester at UU, we have the honour and pleasure to host the Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Cameron Cross, who works on the comparative study of narrative in the Middle East during the Middle Ages, primarily in Persian but also in Arabic, Greek, Geor
17 December, 2025From nonsense towards a meaningful story? The winding path of a Byzantine coin
Mysterious markings on an old coin take Ingela Nilsson on a journey into a storyworld full of unexpected turns. Coins were never part of my undergraduate or even graduate studies. I was trained as a philologist and I guess coins were not considered relevant. It was Roger Scott who first taught me th
18 August, 2025Panagia the Mermaid: A partly lost Aegean storyworld
Viktoria Tasoula takes us to Panagia the Mermaid, a small, mysterious church built on top of a cliff, at the harbour off Skala Sykamineas (Sykamias) on the island of Lesvos. A wall painting depicting the Virgin Mary with a mermaid’s tail gave the church its name, and one of the rarest descriptive
15 April, 2025From Isabella Hammad to Theodore or Edessa: Reading for Recognition and Dialogue in Palestine
Reading a story tends to be a solitary act today. Still, engaging in a narrative remains a vital social practice. The aesthetic, affective, didactic, and political are always tightly interwoven in narrative webs. Critical storytelling is built on the idea that if we arrange those strings in the righ
03 February, 2025Awe and Envy: Byzantine motifs in Scandinavian Saga literature
“The cool breeze forced the black prow of the ship forward along the coast, and the armoured ships proudly bore their tackle. The eminent king saw iron-thatched Miklagard before the bow; many fair prowed ships advanced toward the tall arm of the city”- translation of Morkinskinna by Theodore M. Ande
16 January, 2025“Famous Among the Monarchs:” Queen Tamar and the Rhetoric of Female Success. Part II
Sandro Nikolaishvili continues to follow the panther’s footsteps into the storyworld of the medieval Georgia’s most celebrated woman. The Verse and Prose lauding Tamar Throughout her long reign, the Georgian Queen Tamar proved to her Christian and Muslim subjects that they were mistaken
15 October, 2024“Famous Among the Monarchs:” Queen Tamar and the Rhetoric of Female Success. Part I
Sandro Nikolaishvili follows the panther’s footsteps into the storyworld of the medieval Georgia’s most celebrated woman. In the last decades, scholars have taken considerable interest in studying medieval queenship and the ways women of high standing exercised power and established aut
09 September, 2024The Narrations of Hagia Sophia: an interview with Stephanos Efthymiadis
This spring, one of the Retracing Connections advisory board members, Stephanos Efthymiadis, has spent time at Dumbarton Oaks, working on his book project Hagia Sophia of Constantinople: its Political, Social, and Urban History (537-1453). Since Ingela Nilsson was there too, drafting the very first
27 May, 2024On Jesus as a Trickster Child, and the Unpredictable Narratives in Medieval Manuscripts
Marijana Vuković takes a less traveled narrative path and follows the adventures of Jesus the Menace. It seems unlikely that the foremost person in Christianity – Jesus – would ever appear in a Christian narrative as a child who gets up to mischief, brings harm to his peers and teachers, or general
06 September, 2023Babel: translation and alternate worldmaking in a recent novel
Last spring, our research programme reading group focused on translation theory and translation studies, reading our way through a rather long list of essays, articles and books. One of them was Jacques Derrida’s “Des tours de Babel” (1985), in which Derrida dwells on the problems that translation c
24 January, 2023A Tale of Telling – A week with and among Sami-Kurdish writers
Scene 1: Day, inside After walking in the spring rain through the narrow streets of Pera, we finally reach Kiraathane – the Literature House in Istanbul. We sit around the big table in a rather cramped room, a room literally full of writers. The dark clouds of the sky reflect the conversation: faces
05 July, 2022“The story is for others, the laughter for myself” – How journalistic storytelling can employ humour in migration narratives
In both fictional or autobiographical/biographical writing, there are certain topics that are difficult to address. Abuse, violence, severe poverty or childhood traumas… They are certainly challenging, but also quite compelling, which explains their popularity in several genres. For instance,
07 January, 2022Saint Nicholas is coming (back) to town
Uffe Holmsgaard Eriksen follows the generous saint from Anatolia, across seas and rooftops, into a narrative rabbit hole. On 2 November 2021, the rebuilt Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox church at Ground Zero in New York was opened. The old church was completely destroyed during the terrorist attacks o
06 December, 2021“Pop the top, toss the stump” – The strange dance of the ‘told’ and ‘untold’ in journalistic storytelling
The question of how that which is left untold determines the characteristics and essence of journalistic storytelling is very important and continually changing for any journalist inspired by real life informants and situations. However, it takes time to reach this comprehensive question, it takes c
12 July, 2021Living in the Midst of Storyworlds
Ingela Nilsson explains what storyworlds are, what they can do, and why we enjoy studying them so much.
16 February, 2021
