Announcing CGES Spring 2026 First Book Prize

Please join CGES as we welcome our First Book Prize Winner, Liina-Ly Roos to campus on Friday, April 17th. 

Liina-Ly Roos is Assistant Professor of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Liina-Ly Roos received her PhD from the University of Washington, and she taught at the University of Minnesota before joining the University of Wisconsin. In her teaching and research, she specializes in twentieth to twenty-first century Nordic and Baltic culture.

 

Liina-Ly’s recent book, The Not-Quite Child: Colonial Histories, Racialization, and Swedish Exceptionalism (University of Washington Press, 2025) examines twenty-first century cultural texts that incorporate a child figure who disrupts and rethinks the idealized and normative idea of Swedish childhood in order to rethink colonial histories and racial hierarchies in Sweden. This book has been awarded the CGES-First Book Prize spring 2026. 

 

Liina-Ly will lead a workshop with graduate students to discuss strategies for conceptualizing, researching, and writing a large-scale project, as well as the process by which a dissertation is transformed into a book. Participants will be asked to read the introduction to The Not-Quite Child.
 

In this talk, Liina-Ly Roos will discuss her recent book, The Not-Quite Child: Colonial Histories, Racialization, and Swedish Exceptionalism (University of Washington Press, 2025). The Not-Quite-Child focuses on contemporary films and novels that foreground experiences of three national minority groups in the twentieth-century Swedish welfare state: Indigenous Sámi, Tornedalian, and Finnish-speakers. It argues that a recurring figure in these works is a child who disrupts, rethinks, and reembodies the expected trajectory of growing up as the Swedish child – an idealized Pippi Longstocking-like figure whose going against norms has itself become normative. In doing so, the figure of the “not-quite child” makes visible the implications of historical racialization and colonial histories in Sweden. The talk will first provide context for the significance of the child figure in both the self-image and international reputation of Sweden throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Then it will focus on the analysis of two films, Elina: As If I Wasn’t There (Klaus Härö, 2002) and Sami Blood (Amanda Kernell, 2016), both of which incorporate a child as a central figure to mediate the experiences of racialization and colonialism in Sweden during the 1930s and 1950s. Depicting Tornedalians and the Indigenous Sámi people (both groups located in the northern areas of Sweden have been to varying extent colonized by Sweden), both films construct a child who is at first portrayed to be growing to the side of the “Swedish child,” and both of the children are expected to line up with a trajectory that either assumes a full assimilation or segregation from the settler colonial state, and in both films the child resists that trajectory. Engaging with scholarship on settler colonialism and meanings of race and whiteness in Sweden, the talk analyzes the different modes of filmmaking and emphases on the narrative and visual level in these films that imagine the child eventually lining up with the dominant culture and with whiteness/Swedishness.

 

To attend either event, please RSVP.