The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy has decided to award prizes worth a total of just over SEK 1 million in 2019 for outstanding contributions to scholarship. The following prizes will be presented at the Academy’s Annual Gathering in the Hall of State at Uppsala Castle on 6 November 2019:

Nils Ahnlund Prize Fund 
Professor Ulrika Wolf-Knuts, Åbo (Turku), for her distinguished research in folklore studies and her efforts to promote this field as an academic discipline.

Jöran Sahlgren Prize Fund
Professor Henrik Rosenkvist, Göteborg, for his incisive work on Swedish dialects, in which he has applied new approaches that have rejuvenated this field of research.

Professor Svante Strandberg, Uppsala, for his exceptionally wide-ranging and high-quality writing in the area of Swedish and Scandinavian place-name research, primarily in the specialist field of hydronymy.

Dag Strömbäck Award Fund
Dr Declan Taggart, Omagh, for his groundbreaking studies in the field of Old Norse mythology, and especially for his theoretically aware and well-written monograph How Thor Lost his Thunder: The Changing Faces of an Old Norse God.

Anders Diös Fund for Swedish Local History Research
Associate Professor Johanna Widenberg, Alunda, for her pioneering study Den stora kreatursdöden (The great cattle death), which analyses the bovine diseases of the 18th century from the standpoint of agricultural and cultural history and demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of measures to combat them.

Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy Fund for Swedish Folklife Studies
Dr Zeth Alvered, Uppsala, for his philological contributions, which combine great productivity with high standards of scholarship, and for his valuable manuscript editions in a neglected field of research.

Torsten Jancke Memorial Fund
The antiquarian Anna Elmén Berg, Roknäs, for her thoroughgoing, discerning and empirically sound scholarly output and her studies of the church-building, congregational and preaching traditions of northern Sweden.

Peter Persson, MA, Härnösand, for his extraordinarily accomplished work on the survey Forntid i Västernorrlands län: En historik över arkeologiska undersökningar i 330 år (Prehistoric times in Västernorrland county: A history of 330 years of archaeological investigations), which offers a comprehensive academic synthesis of its subject.

Dr Tuija Kirkinen, Helsinki, for a doctoral thesis that is innovative in terms of both its methodology and its empirical material. Between skins: Animal skins in the Iron Age and historical burials in eastern Fennoscandia uses micro-analyses of fur hairs to shed light on the significance of wild animal skins in Iron Age and historical burials in Finland and Karelia.

Dr Alessandro Palumbo, Göteborg, for his dissertation Skriftsystem i förändring: En grafematisk och paleografisk studie av de svenska medeltida runinskrifterna (Writing systems in flux: A graphematic and palaeographic study of Swedish medieval runic inscriptions), a very well-executed runological study that demonstrates considerable acuity of thought.

Harry Karlsson Fund for Folklife Studies
Dr Katarzyna Herd, Malmö, for her ingeniously conceived dissertation on people’s active engagement with history and how it is manifested in the supporter and club cultures of association football.

Erik and Dency Östhol Endowment Fund
Rolf Lundqvist, Enviken, for his many years championing the importance of forests as cultural landscapes, and in particular for his unequalled efforts to find, highlight and preserve wood carvings made by herding women.

Sten Carlsson Memorial Fund
Associate Professor Annika Sandén, Linköping, for her research in a number of areas, including people on the margins of society, and for the commendable way in which her writing has created wider awareness of and interest in cultural history among the public at large.

Gösta Berg Memorial Fund
The music historian Inger Stenman, Lunde, for her dedicated efforts to document, describe and communicate traditional music-making in Medelpad and Ångermanland, undertaken over many years at the Västernorrland Museum.

Education Prize of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture
Mikael Thomasson, Göteborg, for his achievements as an educator and storyteller in enhancing children and young people’s knowledge of the narrative traditions of the past and, not least, giving them the desire, courage and tools to tell stories themselves.

Scholarship from the Marie-Louise and Gösta Virding Fund
The antiquarian Veronica Palm, Västervik, for her extensive archaeological studies, which have contributed significantly to a greater understanding of the prehistory of the Tjust area of Småland.