Dr Mindy MacLeod

Currently employed in the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne, Dr Mindy MacLeod has also taught at Deakin University and Linnaeus University in southern Sweden. Since the closure of the Swedish department where she lectured in Swedish language, Scandinavian Culture and Society, and Old Norse Language and Literature, she has diversified to teach Runology, Language History, Sociolinguistics, Intercultural Communication, English as a Global Language, Translation Studies, Youth and Popular Culture, Diversity Studies and Research Writing. She also works as a translator and editor for Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic journals.

Mindy has published academic and popular works dealing with aspects of Scandinavian epigraphy: her first book Bindrunes was awarded a literary prize by Kunglinga Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur; Runic Amulets and Magic, published by Boydell Press, was written in collaboration with her colleague Bernard Mees and she is currently in the process of writing her third book.

Mindy took her undergraduate degree at The University of Melbourne and completed much of her M.A. in Germanic Studies and her Ph.D. at the University of Uppsala, where she also studied Old Swedish and other Scandinavian languages. Her academic specialisation is runic literacy as evidenced in texts which range from enigmatic early inscriptions through the highly ritualised memorial formulations typical of the Viking period to the joyfully obscene and everyday messages of the later Middle Ages but she has written on a number of subjects from Germanic philology to sexism in modern Swedish textbooks. She has also received research scholarships to spend time at the Runic Archives in Oslo and Århus University in Denmark, and a Swedish Institute teaching scholarship.

Mindy was employed as English translator on the first runic database, set up at Uppsala University, and maintains close links with The Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala as well as with her former employer Linnaeus University where (until the onset of Covid) she returned to teach an annual summer course. She has also completed a Masters Degree in teaching and has taught French and Swedish language classes at CAE in Melbourne.

Mindy has lived and worked in England, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. She is interested in Germanic language history, Icelandic saga literature and pagan and Christian syncretism in Scandinavian texts and iconography. She is a volunteer wildlife carer and lives outside Melbourne with her family and many cats.