Aarhus University is home to one of the best groups of Viking Studies researchers in the world, at least according to Professor Stephen Mitchell from Harvard. And this is one of the reasons why he chooses to hold one of Harvard University’s popular summer schools in collaboration with Aarhus University year after year.

Mitchell explains that Viking Studies is a highly interdisciplinary field, and that Aarhus University has a wide range of top-notch experts in many different areas such as history, archaeology and languages. He is currently excavating a site on the island of Samsø with the summer-school students.

Most of the students are on a Bachelor’s degree programme at Harvard University, although a few of them come from other American universities. Ever since it was launched, the Viking Studies summer school has been really popular – a fact which has now been discovered by “USA Today”, which includes it in a list of the seven most unique study programmes abroad.

A perfect world

The summer school was born in 2008. It was the brainchild of Pernille Hermann, an associate professor at Aarhus University who was teaching at the Norse Sagas summer school at the time.

“I knew Stephen Mitchell via my network, and we already had one summer school at Aarhus University in this field, so starting a partnership with the Harvard summer school seemed like an obvious step to take,” she explains. She still teaches at the summer school.

Mitchell explains that the summer school wouldn’t have got off the ground without Pernille Hermann’s efforts; and seven years down the line he can’t imagine ever stopping. He sees this as a perfect world for his research, because in the summer Aarhus is turned into the mecca of this particular field. This is his chance to meet up with other researchers who he only ever sees at conferences otherwise.