The Faculty of Arts

My area of research focuses on ethnic minorities, mass violence and pseudoscientific racism, as well as the politics of memory of the Second World War, and the Nazis’ genocide of the Roma people.

From 2018 to 2023, I was the leader of the project “Memory Politics in Far Right Europe: Celebrating Nazi Collaborationists in Post-1989 Belarus, Romania, Flanders and Denmark”. Within the project, our research group studied how ultra-nationalist groups in Northern and Eastern European countries use the Internet to spread narratives about the Second World War in order to legitimise their political movements. These interpretations are characterised by historical revisionism, mainly concerning the military cooperation with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

I am now leading a research group within the ongoing project “Witnessing for the future. The Holocaust, Sweden and Forgotten Early Testimonies.” The purpose of this project is twofold: firstly, to gather previously unknown, unused and neglected Swedish sources on the Holocaust and the Genocide of the Roma; and secondly, to investigate the nature and influence of the Swedish and transnational “ecologies” in which the witnessing took place during the first part of the post-war period, about 1945–1970.

The first states on mainland Europe arose during the late Bronze Age (1640–1200 BCE) on the Peloponnese peninsula in what is present-day Greece. Ever since the excavations of Mycenae by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1800s, we have called the people of these communities Mycenaeans for lack of a better alternative. What social processes led to the politically controlled economy and state apparatus of the period? What did it mean to be a Mycenaean?

In my research, I investigate the concept of archaeological culture and how it relates to group identity, occupational roles, rank, kinship and language. Is it even possible to use material culture as a yardstick for measuring belonging? The sources available are archaeological traces of everyday practices, iconographic self-representations, basic administrative texts written in an archaic Greek, monumental architecture and the Homeric epic poems.

I have worked in particular with everyday consumption, housing and funerals as expressions of various social and economic values linked to individuals and households. Over the course of four or five generations, views on production, ownership and control of various kinds of resources changed. I have tried to show how this new way of taking on various social and political roles laid the foundations for what today we call Mycenaean.

”Hallå där, nu suckar jag – ah” (Hello there, going to sigh now – ah) As Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf turned to the microphone, these were the first words he uttered when he started recording his poems on a tape recorder around 1950, a new-fangled gadget at this time. This is an example of the kinds of encounters and intersections between media and literature that have been a focus in my research as a literature scholar. How have media and technologies influenced literary and artistic activity throughout history? What do such tangible changes mean for language and form in novels and poetry? Do we read and understand what we read differently in our digital information age than we did 50 or 100 years ago?

Interest in the media history of literature has meant that, as a researcher and writer, I have often haunted the borderlands of fiction, where fiction approaches other forms of artistic expression and art forms. I have studied avant-garde poetry and its experimentation with image and sound, and how digital technology and artificial intelligence influence literary form and subjectivity, but also how technical media have been incorporated into our environment and how this has been portrayed in works of literature. This is how ecological perspectives have been incorporated into my research.

In recent years, my interdisciplinary orientation has also come to encompass the humanities in general and broader questions concerning writing, reading and knowledge. My current research concerns older recordings of poetry – a kind of prehistory before contemporary audio books – as well as the transformation of the printed book and reading in contemporary media landscapes.

In my research, I focus on Swedish and foreign literature, mainly German and American, from the 18th century to the present day. I study a number of basic problems in aesthetics, such as imitation and autonomy, as well as literature’s relationship to other art forms.

By highlighting continuity, my research problematises accepted notions of epoch boundaries. Similarly, my studies of the relationship between literature and visual art highlight productive boundary crossings between art forms.

In my latest research, I am working on ethical problems in the literature of the American South – in particular within the genre known as Southern Gothic. It is a dark literary tradition that challenges our ethical standpoints by portraying violence, racism, poverty and degeneration.

My interest in studying ‘race’ brought me to fieldwork in South Africa. For more than twenty-seven years, I have researched various aspects of the lives of white Afrikaners after the apartheid era – focusing on whiteness, social engineering, religious practices and kinship ties for example. I am a cultural anthropologist at Uppsala University, but I am also a docent at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki.

I started my fieldwork in a ‘poor white’ area in Cape Town in 1997, while studying at the universities in Stellenbosch and Pretoria. After four years, I returned to the University of Helsinki to complete and defend my thesis. Following this, I worked on many research projects, including a study of Finnish prisons, while continuing my research on white South Africans. Later I also studied alternative forms of religion in South Africa.

In a current research project, I am studying white Afrikaner families in western Cape Town and more specifically how these families are navigating the world post-apartheid. Since the end of the apartheid era, South Africans have been living with many different kinds of vulnerability in their everyday lives. These include a lack of infrastructure, economic and environmental problems, and crime and poverty. Despite all these challenges, white South Africans have managed to improve their income levels. My research examines how family structures and social networks have contributed to this improvement. Yet another research project concerns the Swedish-Finnish minority in Sweden and their lived experiences in relation to the contemporary and ever-changing social contract.

My research has focused in various ways on the sites of prehistoric rituals. My thesis concerned ceremonial communal sites (marae) in Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean, which often consist of monumental stone structures. These were places where people and their gods could meet in ritualised forms. In Polynesia, there are also abundant ethno-historical sources that, combined with archaeological data, provide good insights into ritualistic acts.

My theoretical interest lies in how, as an archaeologist, I can trace people’s actions through these physical manifestations. Ritualistic acts should in fact also be repeated, socially instilled practices that also be manifest in how people organise their ritual site for example, and what sacrifices occur at the site. It is these acts of manifestation that, when studied in their context, can be understood by us today.

Another research field I am involved in is concerns 5,000 year old burial places from the Scandinavian, and in particular, the Gotland, Stone Age. Here I can trace socially instilled burial practices, which on one level are relatively generally in format and in part ensue from the biological sex of the individual, but above all their age. On an individual level, however, in many cases there are quite special treatments. I am also currently involved in a larger DNA project where we can now see close kinship between certain individuals, which opens the way to a deeper and new way of understanding their relationships.