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.