David Karlander

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University

David Karlander is a linguist. He earned his doctorate from Stockholm University in 2017 and has since
been a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong
(2018–2021), a Marie Skłodowska Curie FCFP fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
(FRIAS) at the University of Freiburg (2021–2022), and Assistant Professor of Swedish Linguistics
at Örebro University (2022–2023). He is currently Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Languages at
Uppsala University (2023– ) and honorary Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong
Kong (2021– ).

Karlander’s research focuses on systems of linguistic thought. Much of his work is concerned with
the overlaps and discrepancies between academic and lay linguistics, often in relation to relatively
marginalised languages. He has published on Övdalsk language documentation, the interface of
linguistics and minority language politics, the history of sociolinguistics, worker Esperantism, and
late-modern graffiti writing. As a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, Karlander will be working on a project
called Making Languages, Making Linguistics, which takes a closer look at the uptake and use of
constructed languages like Esperanto, Ido, Novial and Interlingua in 20th century linguistics. The goal
of this project is to trace the connections between the linguistic thought of pioneering scholars of
language – including Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Hugo Schuchardt, Edward Sapir, Mary Haas, and
Otto Jespersen – and invented language projects, yielding a better understanding of the epistemological
spirit of contemporary linguistic theory.

David Karlander is in residence at the Collegium in the academic year 2023-24.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.