About Uppsala
Uppsala University
Zoom imageUniversity main building
Founded in 1477, Uppsala is Scandinavia’s oldest university. Situated in the city of Uppsala, close to the capital Stockholm, it has around 50,000 students and around 3000 academic staff. The university is divided into nine faculties and around 60 departments. It offers around 75 BA courses and 75 MA courses, along with PhD supervision in 193 subject areas.
The Faculty of Languages has the Nordic region’s widest range of education and research in language studies, offering teaching in around 40 languages, both ancient and modern. The faculty consists of four departments: English, Nordic Languages, Modern Languages, and Linguistics and Philology. Stylistics is taught at both undergraduate and MA level, and there are numerous colleagues across the faculty who have an interest in the area.
There are also many colleagues with related interests, such as corpus and computational linguistics, digital humanities and literary studies generally. (In addition to the departments listed, Uppsala also has a separate Department of Literature and a dedicated Centre for Digital Humanities which is part of the Department of Archives, Libraries and Museums, both in the in the Faculty of Arts). Former academic staff include Roman Jakobson who was based at the University between 1940 and 1941.
The University has eleven libraries, including the Karin Boye Library which is dedicated to the humanities and social sciences. The main university library, known as Carolina Rediviva, is the largest university library in Sweden and maintains a free permanent exhibition on the history of writing. This includes Cuneiform tablets from the 5th century BCE, papyrus scrolls from the second century CE, and the sixth-century Codex Argenteus, or Silver Bible, the most comprehensive exemplar of the Gothic language still in existence.
The city of Uppsala and its environs
Zoom imageUppsala cathedral and the Fyris river.
The picturesque city of Uppsala lies 44 miles north of the capital Stockholm and is the fourth largest city in Sweden. The Fyris river cuts through the city centre which is relatively small and compact with plenty of hotels, bars and restaurants.
There are numerous public parks and gardens in Uppsala, including the University’s two botanical gardens. One of these, the Linnaean Garden, was originally the house and garden of Carl Linnaeus, professor of medicine and botany at the University between 1741 and 1772, and known for his development of the binomial system of nomenclature. Linnaeus’s summer home at Hammarby, just a short bus ride from Uppsala, is also owned by the University and can be visited by the public during the summer months.
Uppsala is dominated by the University which is spread across the city and surrounding area. The Faculty of Languages is concentrated in Engelska Parken, a purpose-built campus for the humanities and social sciences, close to Carolina Rediviva. The PALA conference will take place in Universitetshuset. Built in the 1880s, this building was originally used for all of the university’s activities. Nowadays it is used for lectures, seminars, concerts and university ceremonies.
The University is distinctive in Sweden for maintaining a system of Student Nations. These are something of a cross between Students’ Unions, colleges and fraternities and are entirely run by students. Most of these lie west of the Fyris, where Uppsala Cathedral is also found. The only other Swedish University to have Student Nations is Lund, in the south of the country.
Other visitor attractions in Uppsala include Upplandsmuseet, the museum of Uppsala County; Gustavianum, the University museum which includes an anatomical lecture theatre built in 1662; and Uppsala Castle, built in the 1500s and home to Vasaborgen, a summer open museum in the ruins of the original castle that relates the history of the Vasa kings.
Close to Uppsala is Gamla Uppsala (Old Uppsala), the site of a series of Viking burial mounds and a museum dedicated to the prehistory and archaeology of Uppsala. Gamla Uppsala can be reached by bus from the Central Station in just 15 minutes, or via bicycle in 30 minutes. To the west of Uppsala, just 15 minutes away by bus, is Lake Mälaren which stretches all the way to Stockholm.
Stockholm itself is just 40 minutes by train from Uppsala Central Station and offers a huge range of visitor attractions, including the Royal Palace; the old town; the Vasa Museum, a maritime museum featuring an almost fully intact 17th century warship; Skansen, an open-air museum of rural life in Sweden; and, of course, the ABBA museum. Stockholm archipelago is the second-largest archipelago in the Baltic Sea and numerous Stockholm-based operators offer trips to its many islands.