New honorary doctors at The Faculty of Languages

Helen Morales (b. 1969) has been Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) since 2012. Morales is a classical philologist with unusually broad interests: from ancient fiction and mythology to sexual ethics and literary criticism. She writes about the ancient world and its reception in modern times for both subject experts and the broader public, which puts her in a unique position to convey the diversity of antiquity and the power of tradition. Without ever compromising on subject matter expertise, Morales allows modern voices like Beyoncé to exemplify how the ancient world affects us today. Through books such as Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths (2020), Morales has thus become one of the most important voices in classical studies of the decade.

Thomas Steinfeld (b. 1954) is a journalist and one of the main cultural mediators between Germany and Sweden. His new translation of Selma Lagerlöf's Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden was published in German in 2014 to critical and popular acclaim. His other publications include a biography of Axel Munthe (2007, published in Swedish in 2009), but he has also shed light on educational issues(Bildningen på barrikaden. Ett manifesto [Education on the ropes. A manifesto], together with Per Svensson, 2017) and explained the IKEA phenomenon to Germans (together with Frederic Steinfeld, 2019). Steinfeld has worked for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspapers and was for several years the latter’s head of culture. He also writes for Swedish newspapers such as Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet and appears on Swedish Radio. In his publications, Steinfeld manages to combine the scholarly and the journalistic in a fascinating way.