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

Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt
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.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.