Gunnel Engwall

Professor of Romance Languages, specializing in French, Stockholm University

Gunnel Engwall’s early research focused on corpus-based computational linguistics. In her doctoral
dissertation, Fréquence et distribution du vocabulaire dans un choix de romans français (Stockholm
1974), she studied the vocabulary of twenty-five best-selling French novels from the 1960s. In addition
to the doctoral dissertation and a frequency dictionary, Vocabulaire du roman français (1962–1968):
Dictionnaire des fréquences (Stockholm 1984), she has published more than a dozen scientific articles
in this field.

With the discovery of the original French manuscript of August Strindberg’s Le Plaidoyer d’un fou in
the early 1970s, Engwall began studying various linguistic aspects of that novel and of other texts that
Strindberg wrote originally in French. These studies have resulted in thirty works, e.g. the edited volume
Strindberg et la France (Stockholm 1994) and the articles ‘L’essai “Les Petits” d’August Strindberg en
français’, in Deshima (2013) and ‘Strindberg, journaliste français’, in Études germaniques (2013).

Gunnel Engwall is the former Vice Chancellor of Stockholm University and the former President of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Since 1992, she has chaired the board of the
National Edition of August Strindberg’s Collected Works and has participated in the publication of seventy
of the seventy-two volumes of that edition.

During her year at SCAS, Engwall will examine and evaluate the general principles for textual editions of
literary works, and in particular focus on the lessons learned from the publication of the National Edition
of August Strindberg’s Collected Works. In this endeavour, she will be joined by Elena Balzamo and Ann-
Charlotte Gavel Adams.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2014-15.