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. Along with the continuing development of language skills, the Master curriculum focuses on research-based scholarship on medieval and modern Scandinavian literature. The relatively small size of Scandinavian Studies in Basel  enables intensive contact 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 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, one focus of the curriculum is on language acquisition. 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 master’s degree subject, students further develop their existing language skills or acquire additional knowledge of a second Scandinavian language. In the academic part of the curriculum, they concentrate on theoretical perspectives on Scandinavian literature, as well as on the communication of research results. Students are advised to spend one or two semesters abroad at a university in a Scandinavian country. The outstanding language and communicative skills that the students acquire, along with such key qualifications as independent scholarship, intercultural experience, and research on literature, can be useful in a wide variety of professional fields.