About the Centre

In June 2023, the Swedish Research Council announced 15 national Centres of Excellence, each funded for an initial five years with a possible five-year extension with a view to becoming self-reliant. Our team at Uppsala University was fortunate to be awarded one of these generous grants to set up a Centre for The World in the Viking Age (WIVA) as a collaborative, interdisciplinary meeting place for the study and wider communication of a defining episode in global history. The core staff comprises Professor Neil Price (director) with Docents Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and John Ljungkvist (co-directors), and Ms Rahaf Abu Shaer (coordinator). After a soft start in the winter of 2024, we are preparing for a full launch of WIVA in the coming months.

For centuries, the so-called Viking Age (c.750-1050 CE) has been subject to political misappropriation and projected, monochrome stereotype – making it all the more urgent to emphasise that the people of the time were individuals as varied and complicated, in every way, as ourselves. This spotlight on diversity, in all senses of the term, lies at the heart of the WIVA Centre: our objective is to recover a Viking Age that does not care what we think of it, a pluralistic past as it was (hard though that can be to access), not as anyone would wish it to have been. The notion of a Norse diaspora has now become commonplace in studies of the period, but also requires deconstruction. Our focus is the world in the Viking Age, an arena of mutual interactions, contacts and cultural feedback, subtly different from the more familiar ‘Viking world’. Moving past the Eurocentric notions of a ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Viking Age, it is possible to perceive the finer grain of Scandinavian cultural encounters. We aim to explore the full span of the extended, Afro-Eurasian world of the Norse, looking primarily south and east along the so-called Silk Roads, tracing their activities in vast networks that connected the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, Asia, and the eastern seas – places where the Scandinavians were as often in a minority, but also at a disadvantage.

Over the course of the initial five years of operations, the Centre will be appointing five Early Career Researchers to full-time postdoctoral positions, and twenty International Visiting Researchers who will each spend a period of months in Uppsala. A new interdisciplinary, two-year MA degree programme will also be launched, again addressing the same theme of the world in the Viking Age. All these activities will be supplemented by seminars, workshops, informal contact events, and public outreach.

Finally, WIVA is an invitation, not a fixed entity. The Centre is not a research project, but rather a home and a hub for them, as well as a base for teaching. We will populate WIVA with projects, programmes, and people, and we hope that others will wish to join us on this exciting journey.