The Faculty of Arts

My research deals with the human body and its meanings in the transition between the early modern and modern periods. I study identity and investigate how boundaries for gender, age, class and race have been drawn in medicine, science and law between the late 16th and early 20th centuries. A recurring question for me has been what happens when the historical analysis starts out in language, that is, in the words in sources about the physical body, rather than in the things that surround it. How have terms typical of the period such as deformity, variation and degenerate been used in scholarly and learned contexts? And in what ways does the language used for physical deviations create meaning and power?

In recent years, I have investigated the scholarly understanding of the transition from child to adult over a number of centuries. I have tried to historicise the concept of age and discuss time in relation to the individual life course. How has the language of growing up and physical change aligned with the sorting of people into different genders, estates of the realm in Sweden, and classes? What do such cultural overlaps mean for the still influential concepts of legal age (majority), authority and freedom established in the 18th century? In other studies, I have investigated the boundaries of specifically the human body and the adjacent ‘un-human’ or paradoxical monster category that was part of science in the 17th and 18th centuries. What did the normalisation of extraordinary bodies mean in the early 19th century, and how does it relate to the emergence of global systems of knowledge, early anthropology, and the establishment of the modern concept of race?

In my research work, I want to lay bare the power or politics in which bodies are steeped in all periods in history. My aim in doing so is to highlight humans in the past, their corporeal selves, and to notice the changing nature of something that appears stable. It’s my contention that in this way we can better understand the nuances in what is human, but also how power structures function and emerge.

My research is conducted within the interdisciplinary field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, specialising in the social dynamics of violence, its geostatic dimensions, and the culture of remembrance around the Holocaust, genocides and other massive violations of human rights.
Based on historical case studies in the Balkans and in the Nordic countries, my aim has been to explore the relationship between decision-making at the political level and local violence in different political and social contexts, and to understand the dynamics between victims, perpetrators and spectators.

In recent years, I have devoted much of my time to the culture of remembrance surrounding historical human rights violations, in particular how different actors use remembrance of the Holocaust and other historical injustices to achieve social and political goals. This form of using history can be linked to the processes of state- and nation-building in Eastern and Central Europe, but also to social conflicts that have prompted discussions about the colonial heritage of Western Europe.

The world as we experience it can at times seem very muddled and incomprehensible. Can research help us to better understand our complex world and what it is to be human? When I reflect on human history, I see not just limits set in stone by the natural environment itself, but also a willingness to understand how the environment, ecology and society are interconnected. Whether or not we feel bound by natural environments or social contexts, as individuals we are both limited by and equipped with what perhaps defines being human the most: curiosity and the willingness to understand.

My research and teaching can be summed up as experiments in ways of exploring and using my curiosity to rediscover links – a consequence of the unique time and multidisciplinary depth that environmental history, archaeology and historical ecology offer. I trace relationships between humans and the natural world – from the link between the climate and flora, social and political negotiations, and their physical effects in the form of spatial and temporal changes. My source material ranges from the smallest micro-cosmos of pollen and spores to material culture, written sources, oral history and applied knowledge.

The history of landscapes is essential for the preservation of cultural environments and nature, and many of my research collaborations aim to create a platform for sharing knowledge between researchers and local residents in southern and eastern Africa, Sweden, Sicily and Bolivia. The precarious situation that the climate crisis and the Anthropocene have brought demands new ways of representing and knowing the world. For too long, academia has built up and maintained an understanding of human nature that leaves us ill-prepared to understand ecological connections or the consequences of our lack of understanding. A critical deconstruction of these narratives shows their problematic history and remaining legacy.

In my own research, and in collaboration with students in global environmental history and doctoral students in archaeology and historical ecology, we explore new approaches, perspectives and narratives that challenge preconceived and less explored boundaries between humankind and nature, and the role of academia and society in finding new connections and understandings that stimulate a constructive joy and the drive to change the world around us.

My humanities expertise lies in culture and the media, and the history and culture of the ancient world as well as its international reception. As a professor of digital humanities, I work with digital methods and tools for integrated interdisciplinary analyses between literature and text, and archaeological and historical information. I am particularly interested in improving our understanding of how heritage, archives and museums are being affected by digitalisation and how we can use innovation to enable the management and preservation of heritage collections. I work with digital heritage and heritage data as well as information science – in particular with classification, visualisation, tools and infrastructures. In my previous research, I transformed an ancient travel guide into a digitally enriched book with topographic information about places, people and heritage.

As Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Uppsala University, together with my colleagues I am building a research infrastructure to facilitate future humanities research that is both national and international. As a national coordinator for the National Graduate School in Digital Humanities, I work with cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence for the development of courses and study programmes in this subject area.

My research has always been about the reality and function of literature in people’s lives and the everyday. Literature has had different purposes for people ever since the early 17th century, when more people became literate and a broader market for books developed.

In my research, I have studied the relationship between literature, society and reading – both historically and in the present day. I have investigated how literature and books are used from the perspectives of the sociology of literature and the history of the book on reading, publishing, the book market and the media for literature.

Over the years, a fundamental interest in the reality and conditions for literature has led me to investigate book clubs in the 1970s, how literature is valued, the development of the book market and publishers, popular literature and bestsellers, girls’ reading, audiobooks for children, the global book market, and the media for publishing books. The common denominator in all this is a desire to understand how literature is influenced by material and historical conditions at all stages, from creation to reading. My current research focuses primarily on the dramatic transformation of the contemporary book market and the implications for reading and book culture – especially for children and young people.