Traditions in Dialogue: Language as History

Language as History: Nordic Sound Recordings from the Upper Midwest
Traditions in Dialogue lecture with Joe Salmons, Mirva Johnson, and David Natvig

Free and Open to the Public

Tuesday, November 14, 2017
5:30pm – 6:30pm
Memorial Library, Room 126, 728 State St.

Joe Salmons, Lester W.J. “Smoky” Seifert Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, along with graduate students David Natvig and Mirva Johnson, for the final Traditions in Dialogue event of the semester, Language as History. We humans want and need to understand our past, and languages are a central part of history in the Upper Midwest. Using sound recordings made since the 1930s in the Nordic languages, they will talk about how understanding of language history has been revolutionized because of these recordings, and explore what the recordings can tell us not only about the languages but about the social and cultural contexts in which they were spoken.

The lecture is free and open to the public, and is part of a series of lectures and how-to workshops regarding the significant impact that private collections and archives can have on the community at large presented by Traditions in Dialogue: Nordic-American Communities and Their Arts in Local and Transnational Contexts.  Traditions in Dialogue is a part of the Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with support from Nancy and David Borghesi and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Fall 2017 schedule:

• September 12: Remembering Bob Andresen: A Praise Song for a Proto-Archivist, with Jim Leary
• September 19: Recording Your Own Story [Workshop], with Troy Reeves, Head, Oral History Program, University Archives
• October 3: From Disc to Digital: Sharing a Private Collection with the World, with Jeanette Casey, Head, Mills Music Library
• October 24: Collecting, Hoarding, and Sorting: Creating Personal Archives [Workshop], with Nathan Gibson, Ethnic American Music Curator, Mills Music Library
• November 7: Presenting Your Own Story [Workshop], with the DesignLab*
• November 14: Language as History: Nordic Sound Recordings from the Upper Midwest, with Joe Salmons, Mirva Johnson, and David Natvig

All events are free and open to the public, and will be held from 5:30pm-6:30pm in Memorial Library, Room 126, except for *November 7 event, which will be hosted in DesignLab Media Studio A, College Library.