International Advisory board

Irene García Losquiño

Is Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She investigates viking presence in areas of the diaspora with low levels of Norse settlement, particularly medieval Iberia. Irene received her PhD on runology from the University of Aberdeen in 2013 and, since then, she has worked in institutions in Sweden, Scotland, and Spain, including a postdoctoral Bernadotte Fellowship at the Onomastics Department at the University of Uppsala.

Thorir Jonsson Hraundal

is a Lecturer in Medieval Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, and the director of the Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. He graduated with a BA in General Linguistics from the same university in 1995, and later studied Arabic and Hebrew at the University of Salamanca in Spain, before earning an M.Litt. from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2005. His research there focused on the northward expansion of Islam, particularly the conversion of the Volga Bulgars. Thorir defended his PhD dissertation on Eastern Vikings in Arabic sources at the University of Bergen in 2013.

Ingela Nilsson

Ingela Nilsson is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. Her research interests concern questions of storytelling, translation and adaptation, including cultural transfer. As director of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (2019-21) and within the frame of the research programme Retracing Connections (2020-27, https://retracingconnections.org/), Nilsson was co-curator of the online exhibition Nordic Tales, Byzantine Paths (https://nordictalesbyzantinepaths.ku.edu.tr/).

Marianne Vedeler

holds a position as Professor of Archaeology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. Her primary area of research is the Viking Age and late medieval periods in Scandinavia. She is particularly interested in dress and accessories, textile trade and distribution and food culture. Marianne has over 30 years of experience in museum collection management.

Anna Wessman

Is Professor in Iron Age Archaeology at the University Museum of Bergen (UiB), Norway, with scientific responsibility for the Viking Age collections. She is an expert in ancient mortuary practices and the study of death in Finland and Scandinavia. Her other research interests deal with non-professional engagements with archaeological heritage, particularly hobby metal-detectorists, archaeological finder-collectors and other Heritage Practice Communities. Anna is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) and one of the founding members of the European Public Finds Recording Network (EPFRN).

Henrik Williams

is Professor of Runology at Uppsala University since 2021 and before that holder of the chair in Scandinavian Languages since 2002. Williams’ main areas of reserach are runic inscriptions, Old Norse personal names and philology.

A full CV can be found here

Susan Whitfield

Is currently Professor of Silk Road Studies at the University of East Anglia where she is working on the Nara to Norwich Project with Professor Simon Kaner. She was previously curator of manuscripts from Central Asia at the British Library and founding Director of IDP, an international initiative to digitally reunite manuscripts and artefacts from the eastern Silk Roads (idp.bl.uk). She has published numerous books and articles, curated several exhibitions on Silk Road themes, and travelled extensively to Silk Road sites.

Simon Kaner

Professor Simon Kaner, MA (Cantab.) PhD, FSA, is Executive Director of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, where he is also the Head of the Centre for Archaeology and Heritage. He is Founding Director of the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia. A Trustee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, he is an archaeologist specialising in the prehistory of Japan.

His recent publications include Leiko Ikemura: Usagi in Wonderland (ed. 2024), An Illustrated Companion to Japanese Archaeology (2nd ed. 2020), The Archaeology of Medieval Towns: Case Studies from Europe and Japan (ed. 2021) and Japan and the World: artistic and cultural flows (ed. 2021). He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Korea and Japan. He is Co-Editor of the Japanese Journal of Archaeology.

He has undertaken archaeological fieldwork in the UK and many parts of Europe, as well as in Japan. Prior to joining the Sainsbury Institute he was in charge of development-led archaeology for the county of Cambridgeshire. He has been Council Member of the Society for East Asian Archaeology and the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society.

He has curated a number of exhibitions, including at the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. His most recent exhibitions were Nara to Norwich: art and belief at the ends of the Silk Roads in Norwich (May 2024) and Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre (2022-23).

He was on the international advisory committees for the UNESCO World Heritage nominations of the Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region and Jōmon Sites of Northern Japan. His current research projects include Global Perspectives on British Archaeology and The Shinano-Chikuma River Project: investigating the historic environments of Japanese longest river drainage. In 2011 he was awarded the 10th Miyasaki Eiichi Togariishi Jomon Prize. In 2024 the Sainsbury Institute received a Japan Foundation Award and two Foreign Minister’s Commendations, one for the Institute as a whole and one personally for Simon Kaner.

Fedir Androshchuk

Studied the history and archaeology of Ukraine at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and earned his PhD in 1998. His thesis focused on the cultural and economic interactions between the Slavs and the Northmen in the area between the Dnieper and Desna Rivers in Ukraine. This led him to study military aspects of Viking Age society, as well as Scandinavian contacts with the East and Byzantium. After teaching at the University, he moved to Sweden. Since 2000, he has been affiliated with the Departments of Archaeology at Stockholm and Uppsala Universities as well as the Swedish History Museum. He has authored several books including “Vikings in the East” (Uppsala, 2013), “Viking Swords” (Stockholm, 2014), and "Images of Power: Byzantium and Nordic Coinage" (Paris-Kyiv, 2016). In 2020, he signed a contract with the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine to lead the National Museum of the History of Ukraine and has been researching cultural heritage in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since 2023, he has led the research project “Sweden and Ukraine in the History of Museum Collections and Exhibition Narratives" at the Swedish History Museum. In 2022, he was elected a member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA).

Mattias Jakobsson

Is a professor of Genetics and the head of the Human Evolution research program at Uppsala University. Jakobsson’s research spans from population genetics, human evolution, and human history. His lab uses computational approaches for deciphering complex patterns of large-scale human genomic variation from both modern-day and ancient humans in order to understand human evolutionary history. The lab focuses on interrogating long-standing questions in human evolution, including the colonization and migration in Eurasia, Africa and southeast Asia, including pioneering studies that resolved the enigma of the Neolithic expansion in Europe (Science 2012) and doubled the age of modern humans (Science 2017). Jakobsson has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, and his work has been cited more than 29,000 times. Jakobsson has been a Wallenberg Scholar since 2020, and has led several large research projects funded by the ERC, Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation and the Swedish Research council. He has received the Tage Erlander prize and the Göran Gustafsson prize from the Royal Academy of Sweden, the Linné medal in gold from Uppsala University and the Thuéus prize from the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala.

Sophie Bønding

Holds a PhD in Religious Studies and is a Research Fellow in the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions, and Gender Studies at Stockholm University. A specialist in the religious imaginaries, beliefs, and behaviours of the Viking-Age Norse, her research explores how religion is situated in and entangled with socio-political networks and human life-worlds. Her publications cover various aspects of Viking-Age religion, identities, and cultural encounters. As a secondary specialism, she studies the Romantic reception and cultivation of Norse religion and mythology, particularly during the 19th century. She has worked at research institutions in Denmark and Sweden and is a member of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Sweden.

Anders Ögren

Is Chair Professor and Research Director of Economic History at Uppsala University. He is a specialist in the history of economic thought, monetary and financial history, new institutional economics and macroeconomic history. His work is known for its empirically based challenges to received wisdom, new interpretations of the nature of money and credit, and for combining the work of anthropologists, economists and historians – all fields in which Ögren has published widely. Prior to joining Uppsala University, Ögren researched and taught at Lund University, Columbia and NYU in New York, Sciences Po and Paris Nanterre in Paris, and the Stockholm School of Economics.

Jenny Wallensten

Holds a PhD in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History from Lund University. She is the director of the Swedish Institute at Athens since 2017 as well as affiliated associate professor (docent) at Lund University. Her research focuses on ancient Greek religion, especially concerning naming the divine and communication between gods and humans through inscribed gifts. She is the organizer of the monthly Athens Greek Religion Seminar since 2015.