Gunhild Eriksdotter

Short presentation

Researcher active in the projects Hasp – Houses and Social Practices and Staging Heat and Light. Housing practices and indoor environments during the early modern period.

Biography

I have a background in architectural history and building archaeology through education at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and Università di Siena, Italy. I received my PhD in medieval archaeology at Lund University in 2005 with the dissertation Behind the Facades. Building archaeological ways to capture time, space, and use. 

Both before and after my PhD, I have worked as a field and building archaeologist in various locations in Sweden as well as in Estonia, Italy, Tanzania, and Colombia. 

I have taught at all levels of higher education at the universities of Lund, Stockholm, and Uppsala (Campus Gotland) and have also held courses in building archaeology at the Swedish Institute in Rome and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. 

After my PhD, I participated in the research project Energy Efficiency in Historical Buildings, Department of Art History (Campus Gotland), Uppsala University, from 2011 to 2013. I have further led research projects, such as Building archaeological knowledge and needs Analysis – a problematizing study (2014) and The Importance of Building Archaeology. People, Buildings, Contexts (2016). 

Since autumn 2022, I have been active in Hasp – Houses and Social Practices (Swedish Research Council, project leader Dag Lindström) and from January 2025 also in the project Staging Heat and Light. Housing practices and indoor environments during the early modern period (Berit Wallenberg Foundation, together with Linda Qviström).

Research

My current research mainly deals with early modern urban dwellings and questions of habitability, indoor climate, and comfort. The houses were built during a dynamic period when new ways of arranging rooms and various technical innovations to control the indoor climate created opportunities for changed usages and functional patterns. I am particularly interested in studying how combinations of different heat sources were used, not only to master the heat but also to maintain social status and comfort; aspects which affected the various users of the houses, their movements, and actions. 

I am also engaged in questions concerning the relationship between the spaces in buildings and their spatialities as part of the development of building archaeological theory and method.