Gustavs Strenga is a historian and researcher at the University of Greifswald. Gustavs received his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Latvia (2004), Master’s degree in Medieval studies from the Central European University (2006) and defended his PhD Thesis “Remembering the Dead: Collective Memoria in Late Medieval Livonia” at the Queen Mary University of London (2014). Gustavs Strenga is also affiliated with the National Library of Latvia where he has been active as a senior researcher and exhibition curator. Gustavs has been fellow (2009-2012) at the PhD research group (GRK 1288) "Friends, Patrons, Clients. Practice and semantics of friendship and patronage in historical, anthropological and cross-cultural perspectives" at the University of Freiburg and a post-doc research fellow (2018-2020) at Tallinn University where he worked on the project "Economy of symbolic exchange. Gift-giving as a social, cultural and political practice in the late medieval Livonia." Gustavs’ main research interests include the history of medieval Livonia, memory studies, gift giving as a historical phenomenon and book history. At the University of Greifswald he is part of the project “Saints and Heroes from Christianization to Nationalism: Symbol, Image, Memory (Nord-West Russia, Baltic and Nordic countries).”

Upcoming

Gustavs Strenga (2022). Donations, Discipline, and Commemoration. Group-building in the Transport Workers Guilds of Mid-fifteenth Century Riga. Journal of Medieval History.

Gustavs Strenga (2021). Gifts and Conflicts: Objects given during the Entry of Archbishop Silvester Stodewescher in the Riga Cathedral (1449). Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300-1600, ed. by Gustavs Strenga and Lars Kjær, London: Bloomsbury,

Gustavs Strenga (2021). Repulsion and Attraction. The Middle Ages at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Mittelalterliches Livland und sein historisches Erbe/ Medieval Livonia and its Historical Legacy, ed. by Andris Levāns, Ilgvars Misāns, and Gustavs Strenga, Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut

Published

Gustavs Strenga (2021) Turning Transport Workers into Latvians? Ethnicity and Transport Workers’ Guilds in Riga Before and After the Reformation. Journal of Baltic Studies, 52:1, 61-83.

Gustavs Strenga (2020). Cistercian Networks of Memory Commemoration as a Form of Institutional Bonding in Livonia and Beyond During the Late Middle Ages. Making Livonia: Actors, Institutions, and Networks in Medieval and Early Modern Baltic Sea Region, ed. by Anu Mänd, Marek Tamm. London: Routledge, 212-231.

Gustavs Strenga (2019). Die Formierung der Letten als ethnische Gemeinschaft zur Zeit der Reformation in Riga. Reformation und Ethnizität. Sorben, Letten und Esten im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Madlena Mahling, Susanne Hose, and Friedrich Pollack, Bautzen: Domowina-Verlag, 77–97.

Gustavs Strenga (2019). Distorted Memories and Power. Patrons of the Teutonic Order in the Fifteenth Century Prayer of the Livonian Branch. Journal of Baltic Studies, 50:2, 143-161,

Gustavs Strenga (2018). Distance, presence, absence and memoria. Commemoration of deceased Livonian merchants outside their native cities during the late Middle Ages. Hansische Geschichtsblätter 136 (2018): 63-92.

Gustavs Strenga (2017). Bonding with “Friends” and Allies. The Teutonic Order’s Confraternity and Networking Strategies of the Livonian Master Wolter von Plettenberg. Letonica 36 (2017): 136–60.

Gustavs Strenga (2017). Remembering the common past: Livonia as a lieu de mémoire of the Teutonic Order in the Empire. Livland - eine Region am Ende der Welt? Forschungen zum Verhältnis zwischen Zentrum und Peripherie im späten Mittelalter = Livonia - a region at the end of the world?: studies on the relations between centre and periphery in the later Middle Ages, ed. by Anti Selart and Matthias Thumser, Köln: Böhlau, 2017, 347–70.

Gustavs Strenga (2017). Faith, Politics, Languages and Books. The Reformation in Riga (1521–1525). Luther. The Turn Catalogue of the exhibition “Luther. The Turn”, National Library of Latvia, Riga, 01.11.2017 – 04.02.2018, ed. by Andris Levāns and Gustavs Strenga, Riga: Latvijas Nacionālā bibliotēka, 2017, 138-146.

Solveig Marie Wang is an interdisciplinary researcher of medieval Fennoscandia at the University of Greifswald. Solveig received her MA-degree in history at the University of Aberdeen in 2018 and defended her PhD thesis ‘Decolonising Medieval Fennoscandia: Norse-Saami Relations in the Medieval Period’ at the same university in 2021. Solveig is the managing editor of the interdisciplinary and Open Access periodical Apardjón Journal for Scandinavian Studies (https://www.abdn.ac.uk/sdhp/apardjn-journal-for-scandinavian-studies--1802.php). She is also affiliated with the research group Creating the New North: Manifestations of Central Power in the North AD 500-1800 at the Arctic University of Norway. Solveig’s main research interests lie in the medieval north, with a specific focus on the historiography of Indigenous peoples, postcolonial frameworks, cross-cultural contact and concepts like fluidity. At the University of Greifswald she is part of the project ‘Mission Before Colonisation: A Reassessment of Religious Contact in Greenland and Sápmi, 1000-1550’.

‘Decolonising Norse Studies: Colonial Strategies and the Saami as the Other in Scholarship’, Kyngervi, 3 (2021) [forthcoming]

Apardjón Volume 2, ed. by Hannah Booth, Heidi Synnøve Djuve, Deniz Cem Gülen, Ingrid Hegland, Jennifer Hemphill, Simon Nygaard, Alessandro Palumbo, Solveig Marie Wang and Jessie Yusek (Aberdeen: Apardjón Journal for Scandinavian Studies, 2021)

Grettis rímur, trans. by Lee Colwill, ed. by Hannah Booth, Heidi Synnøve Djuve, Deniz Cem Gülen, Ingrid Hegland, Jennifer Hemphill, Solveig Marie Wang and Jessie Yusek (Aberdeen: Apardjón Journal for Scandinavian Studies, 2021)

‘Conceptualizing the Multi-Cultural North of the Íslendingasögur: Peoples, Places and Phenomena’, Nordlit, 46 (2020), pp. 245-262

Apardjón Volume 1, ed. by Daniel Cutts, Heidi Synnøve Djuve, Deniz Cem Gülen, Ingrid Hegland, Jennifer Hemphill, Solveig Marie Wang and Caroline Wilhelmsson (Aberdeen: Apardjón Journal for Scandinavian Studies, 2020)