We are pleased to announce that the 35th lecture of our online series will be given by John Björkman (Turku, Finland) on Friday, 6th of June, 2025 at 17:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST). His talk is titled Patterns in the Locations of Belief Narratives.
Please find the abstract, the speaker’s short bio and link (with password) to the zoom meeting below and on the attached poster.
Topic: 35th BNN Online Lecture by John Björkman
Time: Friday, June 6, 2025, 17:00 Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb, Central European Summer Time (CEST)
Join Zoom Meeting: https://ut-ee.zoom.us/j/93135157306?pwd=rilQQLiSQNggQxiWIujPn8WhWiDZs8.1
Meeting ID: 931 3515 7306
Passcode: BNN
We will open the Zoom session ten minutes in advance; do come in and say hello. Please keep in mind that it helps if you use your name as the Zoom handle (rather than an abbreviation or alias, etc). Thank you!
If you have any trouble joining, you are welcome to send an email to our colleague Margaret Lyngdoh margaret.lyngdoh[at]ut.ee. Please pay attention to the time-zone related time difference and that it is Central European Summer Time (CEST). For your local time please check this page.
The Online Lecture Topic
In his doctoral dissertation, John Björkman has located and studied altogether 120 natural sites mentioned in Finnish and Finland-Swedish belief narratives as locations of supernatural events or beings, or locations connected to ritualized behaviour and prohibitions. In his lecture, Björkman will present how he has been able (and sometimes unable) to trace the locations mentioned in historic narratives as well as what can be revealed through field visits to the sites and analysing their locations on historic village maps.
John Björkman (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher in folkloristics at the University of Turku (Finland). His doctoral dissertation “Healing Springs and Haunted Woods. Sacred sites of folk belief in Southwest Finnish village societies” was defended in November 2024 at Åbo Akademi University (Finland), and it is available in the form of an e-publication here:
https://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/190033/bjorkman_john.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
You can find more information on the previous lectures and our speakers at the ISFNR website of the lecture series.
