Adam Hjorthén

Short presentation

I am Associate Professor of history, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and Director of the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS). My research focuses on U.S. cultural memory, and Swedish-American relations. I am currently engaged in two research projects on heritage aspects of US political polarization: dealing with white ethnic identity today, and exploring the musealization of the US Constitution

Co-director (verksamhetsledare) at Humtank.

Director of Graduate Studies, English

Biography

I have been Senior Lecturer in North American Studies since 2020, and became Associate Professor (docent) in history in 2023.

I am Uppsala University's member of the national humanities think tank Humtank and, since 2025, I serve as its Co-director.

I have a PhD in history from Stockholm University (2015), where I was a doctoral student in the Research School for Studies in Cultural History (FoKult). In 2017–2020, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, and at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin (as a postdoc in cultural history at SU, and through the international postdoc program of Vetenskapsrådet). I have previously taught at the history departments at Stockholm and Uppsala, and been a visiting scholar at George Washington University and the University of Minnesota.

I currently serve on a number of boards and committees through Uppsala University and beyond, including:

• Member from UU on the Social Sciences & Humanities Working Group in the Coimbra Group (2025–2028)
• The Nominating Committee of the Faculty of Languages (2022–2025)
• The Advisory Committee of the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, Augustana College, Illinois (SSIRC) (2021–2024)

I have previously served as the president of the Swedish Association for American Studies (SAAS) in 2016-2020, and as Sweden's representative on the executive board of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS). I have been a board member and secretary of SAAS (2012–2016), member of the Board of Directors of the Swedish American Historical Society (2021–2024), member of the Executive Council of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (2023–2027), and associate editor of Swedish-American Studies (formerly the Swedish-American Historical Quarterly; 2021–2025).

At UU, I have served on the board of the Democracy and Higher Education research program (2024–2025).

I am the 2018 recipient of the Loubat Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquity, and the 2015 Orm Øverland Prize from the Nordic Association for American Studies.

Research

My research deals with American cultural heritage and cultural memory, and 20th and 21st century Swedish-American relations. I am currently engaged in two research project:

• Refracting Roots: A Study of Political Polarization and Swedish Heritage in Contemporary United States (together with Adam Kaul, Uppsala University/Augustana College, Illinois), funded by Åke Wibergs stiftelse and Sven & Dagmar Saléns stiftelse
• A More Perfect Union? Public Scholarship and the United States Constitution in a Polarized Society (2024–2025, funded by the Democracy and Higher Education research program at Uppsala University.

These current research projects explore the intersections of cultural memory and political polarization in the United States today. They study white ethnic heritage through the case of Swedish Americans in Minnesota, as well as the public scholarship of the U.S. Constitution at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA.

I recently co-edited a special journal issue on teaching American Studies in the Nordic countries for American Studies in Scandinavia (with Jenny Bonnevier), and on humanitarian memories in German-American relations in Journal of Transatlantic Studies (with Sönke Kunkel and Leonie Werle).

My previous publications have explored the many ways in which histories of Swedish settlement and immigration in North America have been made meaningful and functional on both sides of the Atlantic. This includes studies of commemorations, monuments, museums, tourism, and the popular movement of genealogy. This research has for example resulted in my monograph Cross-Border Commemorations Celebrating Swedish Settlement in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018).

I have also worked extensively with developing the analytical and methodological study of Swedish-American relations. Together with Professor Dag Blanck I am co-founder and co-organizer of the research network “Swedish-American Borderlands,” funded by the Swedish Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (RJ). This international and interdisciplinary network—which gathers twenty-plus scholars from Europe and North America—is an attempt at reconceptualizing the broader field of Swedish-American relations. This work has been publish in a special issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies (7:1), and the edited volume Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).