To mark the 70th birthday of HM King Carl XVI Gustaf in 2016, Sweden’s Royal Academies together established the Bernadotte Programme, with the aim of offering opportunities for mentored in-depth study and development for researchers and young practitioners in the arts in the Academies’ areas of interest. In addition to the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture, the programme involves the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and the Swedish Academy.


In 2018, two Bernadotte Scholarships were awarded: to Associate Professor Jasmina Talam and Dr Misha van Kan. Jasmina Talam is an ethnomusicologist, working at the Academy of Music in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is part of the University of Sarajevo. Her project, entitled ‘Bosnian refugees in music-making and cultural organisational activities in Sweden’, is a study of the music and music-making of Bosnians in Sweden in the fifty or so exile associations that exist in the country. She is interested in how Bosnian-Swedes are maintaining and changing the traditional music of their native country. Mischa van Kan is a Dutch jazz researcher who took a PhD in musicology at the University of Gothenburg early in 2017 and is now involved in a postdoc project at the University of Oldenburg, just outside Hamburg. His research under the Bernadotte Programme is on ‘The development of record covers and their importance for jazz in Sweden’. He is studying how the covers of Swedish jazz records from the 1950s and 1960s were designed to create – along with the recorded music – the image of a modern Sweden with a good sense of form.

In 2017 the Board of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy awarded two Bernadotte Scholarships: to Irene García Losquiño, Alicante, Spain, and Luke John Murphy, Aarhus, Denmark. Irene García Losquiño’s research was concerned with ‘The North and West Germanic Place-Names of Galicia, Spain’, while Luke John Murphy’s project was on ‘The Limits of Discrepancy – Mapping Variation in Pre-Christian Nordic Religion’. 

In 2016 the Board of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy awarded two Bernadotte Scholarships: to Melanie Schiller, Groningen, The Netherlands, and Declan Taggart, Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Schiller received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam early in 2016 for a thesis on Germanness in German popular music over 70 years. As a visiting researcher at the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research, within the framework of the Bernadotte Programme, she studied how Swedishness is expressed in contemporary Swedish popular music. Taggart gained his PhD at the Centre for Scandinavian Studies, University of Aberdeen, in 2015, presenting a thesis in the history of religions that explored the figure of Thor in Old Norse religion. As a Bernadotte Scholar, he pursued his research on this subject in greater depth, among other things comparing older and more recent perceptions of the deity. Taggart was a visiting researcher at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm University.

Presentation of the 2017 Bernadotte Scholarships. Photo: Kungahuset.se.
Jasmina Talam and HM The King. Photo: Urban Wedin.