Keynote Speakers

Paul Kiparsky
Stanford University

Tomas Riad

Bilden är friköpt från Svenska Akademien. Fotograf: Helena Paulin-Strömberg

Tomas Riad
Professor, Department of Scandinavian languages, University of Stockholm, Sweden; Member of the Swedish Academy

My main research area is phonology, North Germanic prosody in particular. I have worked on the development of the Germanic stress system and the origin of NGmc tone accent, as well as the development of the presentday tone accent typology. I also work on the general relationship between poetic meter and language, where my approach is to derive as much as possible in meter from the linguistic grammar. My recent work in this area concerns the metrical system of Tashlhiyt Berber and the variants of dactylic hexameter in Swedish.

Jesper Svenbro
Swedish Academy

Kallio_photo-1

Kati Kallio
Finnish Literature Society (SKS)

Kati Kallio is a post-doc researcher in Finnish Literature Society in the project ”Letters and songs: Registers of beliefs and expressions in the Early Modern North” of the Finnish Academy. She wrote her doctoral theses on the local genres and song registers of Ingrian Kalevala-metric poems. More recently, she has analysed the relationships of early modern Finnish clergymen to oral poetics, and the relationship of metrics, music and performance in Finnic (Karelian and Ingrian) oral poetry.

Jarkko Niemi
Ph. D., University Lecturer, Adjunct Professor of Ethnomusicology (University of Tampere), and of Uralic Cultural Studies (University of Helsinki)

As an ethnomusicologist and music anthropologist I am interested in human creative expression, conceptualized, mastered and performed in the cultural environment of the participants of the culture. I am interested in the whole continuum of cultural contexts for creative expression, but with the research projects of the last years, particularly in historically continuous local oral traditions.

Besides ethnomusicology, I have learned from social sciences, especially from cultural and social anthropology (ethnic identity, kinship), linguistic anthropology and folkloristics (communication, oral performance, textualization), also accompanied with an orientation towards historical sciences (ethnic history, tradition). Methodologically, my research activities have always been strongly inclined towards ethnography, both as emphasizing contact, participation, communication and discussion with people, and also as recording performance data for later analysis. I have been mostly working with the representatives of indigenous cultures of the Russian North.

In the study of human creative expression, there have been particularly intriguing questions for me, as for example: How the tradition exists and works within the social group? What is expressed or communicated by the various forms of tradition? What are the boundaries for stylistically acceptable structures of the traditional creative expression?

This last question sums up much of the challenges, problems and data-oriented analytical explorations for my work: how can we make an analytical account of an acoustic, aural, sounding and structured performance? Are there any sonic “grammaticalities” in a sung performance? Are there appropriate symbolical systems for discussing these sonic orders in graphic form?