Scandinavia is fascinating not only with its spectacular landscapes but just as much with its influential popular culture, which ranges from children's books and detective fiction to ABBA and Mando Diao, not to mention Arne Jacobsen and IKEA. Scandinavian Studies offers a direct approach to the languages, literatures, and cultures (including film, art, music, theater, and media) of the countries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, as well as the Swedish-speaking parts of Finland. On the Bachelor level, the focus is on language acquisition (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, or Icelandic) and an introduction to Scandinavian literary studies and medieval studies. The relatively small size of  Scandinavian Studies in Basel makes intensive contact possible between students and instructors, as do the excursions that, as a rule, take place every one or two years.

Scandinavian Studies in Basel covers the complete range of languages, literatures, and cultures of Scandinavia in their historical and regional complexity. The primarily philological and textual orientation of the subject area is supplemented by approaches from cultural studies, which consider Scandinavia's relationships to other languages and literatures as well as to other subjects, such as gender, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and economics. Beyond that, Scandinavian philology connects work on texts and other forms that language takes with their position in the cultural process and in the context of a range of linguistic, visual, and acoustic media.

These are the primary research focuses of the Chair of Scandinavian Studies, Professor Lena Rohrbach:

• Medieval literature in Scandinavia, especially sagas
• Historical and cultural narratology of Scandinavian literature
• Written culture in pre-modern Scandinavia
• Intersections of genre and media in the Scandinavian tradition.

As with other foreign-language philologies, the curriculum first focuses on learning one of the modern Scandinavian languages. In Basel, courses are regularly offered in Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, with courses in Icelandic offered when there is enough demand for them. In the fourth semester of the Bachelor curriculum, students also take a language course of at least two weeks in the country of the main language they have chosen. The academic part of the curriculum is divided into Medieval Scandinavian Studies and Modern Scandinavian Studies. The courses cover the whole field of Scandinavian Philology, including Scandinavian literatures, with respect to historical, regional, and social developments in the European context as a whole. In the course of their studies, the students acquire solid academic knowledge in the subject area as well as fully developed language and communication skills.