“America — Land of Dreams”

Join the Department of Scandinavian Studies on Monday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. in Confer 128 for the lecture “America—Land of Dreams: A Swedish-American journalist’s personal and political perspective on the United States from California in the 1960s to today’s Washington, D.C.”

Swedish-American journalist and author Klas Bergman’s book Amerika—drömmarnas land (America—Land of Dreams) was recently published in Sweden. Following his boyhood dreams in Stockholm to go to America, the book is about these years and about how his dreams were affected by what was unfolding in America: the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, Nixon and Watergate, the Reagan years, 9/11 and terrorism, and the election of America’s first African-American president.

Americans still dream, and we who have come here from other countries also dream, Bergman writes. But does the American dream still exist and is it still reachable? Where is America heading? Bergman’s lecture will address his experiences, and these topics and questions.

Klas Bergman, a Swedish-American journalist and author, was born in Stockholm but has spent most of his adult life abroad, mainly in the United States. He received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Stanford University where he was also a Professional Journalism Fellow 1982-83.

Bergman spent most of his journalistic career with the leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, where he was a foreign correspondent in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Rome, Italy; and Washington, DC. After leaving Dagens Nyheter in 1989, he was the East European correspondent, based in Warsaw, for the Christian Science Monitor, and foreign policy reporter for Christian Science Monitor Television, based in Washington, D.C.

Since 1992, Bergman has served in numerous positions in communications and public relations, among them as press counselor at the Swedish Embassy in Germany, as chief of media relations at the World Bank, and as communications director at Stanford University and Yale University.

He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., where he works as freelance journalist and writes the blog “From America” in both Swedish and English at http://klasbergman.com