Professor Neil Prie

Director of the WIVA Centre. A specialist in the Viking Age and the pre-Christian religions of the North, he holds the Established Chair of Archaeology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. At the same institution he has also been appointed Distinguished Professor by the Swedish Research Council, in conjunction with his direction of the ten-year research project ‘The Viking Phenomenon.’ Educated at the universities of London (UCL), York and Uppsala, he has previously held academic posts in Oslo, Stockholm and Aberdeen. Neil’s external commitments have included co-direction of the Harvard Summer School in Scandinavia, and visiting positions at universities in Johannesburg (Wits), Vancouver (SFU), and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (UHI); he is currently Professor of Indigenous Studies and Global Archaeological Diversity within the GI-CoRE Global Station at Hokkaido University, Japan. He is a Fellow of ten learned societies in Sweden and the UK, including Sweden’s oldest, the Royal Society of Sciences, which in 2017 awarded him the Thuréus Prize for his contribution to Viking Studies; in 2023 he was awarded the Rudbeck Medal “for extraordinarily prominent achievements in science”. Neil’s researches have taken him to more than 50 countries, and his publications have appeared in 22 languages. His books include The Vikings in Brittany, The Viking Way, The Viking World (with Stefan Brink), The Vikings (with Ben Raffield), and Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings which was the Times and Sunday Times ‘History Book of the Year’ in 2020. He is a frequent contributor and presenter for television documentaries and film, and he was historical consultant for The Northman (dir. Robert Eggers, 2022).