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Simon Nygaard

Title

Assistant Professor, PhD

Primary affiliation

Simon Nygaard

Areas of expertise

  • Study of Religion
  • Ritual Sudies
  • Pre-Christian Nordic religion
  • Runologi and runic studies
  • Orality and oral tradition

Contact information

Telephone number
Email address

Research

In my research, I specialise in Viking-Age ritual, religion, culture and society and Old Norse poetry and language. At the same time, I value a theoretically and empirically comparative perspective. 

I work with oral poetry and ritual performance in the Old Norse world; Nordic mythology; runic inscriptions and runic poetry; cultural memory studies; and the application of bio-cultural evolutionary theories in the history of religion. I am especially interested in how rituals might have been practiced and how they affected the practitioners.

Teaching activities

I teach courses on and in the history of religion with a focus on archaic (historical) religions, primarily pre-Christian Nordic religion and mythology, but also other historical religions such as West African Yoruba religion and Hawaiian religion. I also teach the course primary language paper in Old Norse language, where the students are trained in analysis of their own translations of Old Norse source texts. In addition, I have, among other things, taught courses dealing with gender and femininity in the pre-Christian Nordic region, the study of rituals in the past and present, as well as orality and oral tradition and religions.

Selected publications

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