Helena Wangefelt Ström

Short presentation

I am a Senior Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies with a PhD in Museology at the Department of ALM, teaching and supervising PhD and MA students in ALM and Digital Humanities. My PhD thesis investigated transfers between sacredness and heritage, in 17th-century Rome and Venice and today. I am interested in museums and cultural heritage as phenomena and their role in our time, as well as in religion and the use of cultural heritage in relation to politics, identity, and human rights.

Keywords

• cultural heritage
• religion
• human rights
• museums
• cultural heritage policy
• museology
• AI
• critical heritage studies
• sacred cultural heritage
• religious cultural heritage
• collections
• collecting
• collection history
• museum history
• early modern history
• early modern Italy
• Rome
• and Venice

Biography

I grew up in Vallentuna north of Stockholm, surrounded by medieval churches and memories from the Viking Age, and became interested in history and material memories of the past at an early age. After a humanities high school degree with Latin and Greek at Tibble Gymnasium, I entered Uppsala University with Cultural Studies and continued studies in, among other things, Art history and History of Ideas and Science.

After a one-year break from studies to be First Curator at Uplands Nation (a student confreaternity), I worked at Skokloster Castle Library within the Sesam Project, an early digitization project for museums. During these years I got an internship and collaborated in a cataloguing project in the Vatican Library, which was the start for future research and collaborations in Rome and Venice.

I spent the fall of 2000 in Jerusalem, where I became interested in how religion, cultural heritage, and politics intersect. After returning home, I chose to work on more societal issues, and for a few years I had the opportunity to work with project development and project applications for larger collaborative projects at the Christian Council of Sweden, focusing on both international collaborations and national projects with a societal focus.

In 2004, I took up the position of head of Culture department on the island of Gotland, where I worked with regional and municipal culture funding and with regional development. In that role, I was responsible for the project as pilot region when the Cultural Collaboration Model (Kultursamverkansmodellen) was introduced. Alongside my work, I studied cultural heritage politics at the then University of Gotland (now Uppsala University Campus Gotland), and decided to finish my master's thesis in History of Ideas and Science during a parental leave, and seek a PhD position. After the thesis was published as an article, I applied for and was accepted to a PhD position in Museology at Umeå University, within which I received a one-year scholarship at the Swedish Institute in Rome for research in 2013/14.

I defended my thesis in 2022 after working as a teacher at the Department of ALM in Uppsala since 2019, and in 2023 became a permanent Senior Lecturer at Conservation on Campus Gotland, where I was director for the international master's degree in cultural heritage and sustainable development. In 2024, I was appointed Senior Lecturer in Museum and Heritage studies at the Department of ALM, and was charged with responsibility for the in-depth parts of the master's program. I am a member of the scientific council at CRS, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion and Society, and am an assistant supervisor for two international doctoral students.

In addition to course development and teaching, I am involved in various research collaborations nationally and internationally, and am frequently hired as a keynote speaker and participant in panel discussions at the intersections between heritage, religion, history, and current politics.

Research

I am a member of the scientific advisory board of CRS, Center for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society at Uppsala University, and one of two research leaders for the thematic group on Secularity, Secularism and Human Rights.

I am also a member of the international research group Emodir, Early Modern Religious Dissent and Radicalism, where I served in the steering committee and in communication manager.

I am an invited keynote speaker and lecturer in various national and international events within and outside of academia.

I participate in a number of international research projects. For example:

Heritage Practice Communities in a Digitized World, PI Dr. Suzie Thomas at University of Antwerp.

Mapping Dissonant Objects. Religious material agencies across space and time. PI Dr. Sabina Brevaglieri, universitetet i Wien.

My PhD thesis, Lighting candles before a headless Jesus. Sacred heritage, heritagized sacredness, and the many journeys between categories, investigates the transfers between sacredness and heritage: as a production of categories, and as practice. The main case study of the production of sacred heritage is early modern Rome and Venice, and the investigation of practices includes examples from various times and religions.

My general field of interest is vast and includes, among other topics: heritage production and heritage politics, history of religion and history of ideas, visual and material culture, museum culture and authenticity, and cultural policy and politics. I am currently interested in classification and categorization practices, and how AI plays into these within the heritage field. Also, I am interested in developing methods through which scholars within heritage studies and history can meet and collaborate. Religion and its role in society today is an overarching theme for my research interests.

I serve as a reviewer for, among others, the International Journal for Heritage Studies, Quaderni Storici, History of European Ideas, and RIG (Swedish Journal for ethnology).

I am currently an assistant supervisor for two doctoral students at Uppsala University and the University of Groningen, respectively.

Appointments

2023 – 2024 Invited speaker at, among others, Maryland University (US), Sapienza University (Rome), Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam), The Institute for Historical Reesearch (London), The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, National Heritage Board, the Museums Association of Norway, and numerous conferences held by The Church of Sweden.

2023 – 2026 Member of the board of Gotland County Museum

2023 – present Affiliated member and research leader at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS) at Uppsala University

2021 – present Member of the strategic consultation group at the Swedish National Archives (Samrådsgruppen för enskilda arkiv, Riksarkivet)

2022 – 2023 Member of the steering committee for the Religion and Collections Heritage Group, directed by Crispin Paine (UCL) and John Reeves (British Museum)

2018 – 2023 Member of the steering committee of Emodir international research group (Early Modern religious Dissents and Radicalism), www.emodir.net

Scholarships (selected)

2025 Gihl’s scholarship, Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, for archival research in Rome

2023 SuHRF (Sustainable Heritage Research Forum, Uppsala University Campus Gotland) grant to co-write research application within the CRS at Uppsala University

2022 Sederholms scholarship for heritage research in Italy, fall 2022, Uppsala University

2013 – 2017 Gihl’s scholarship, Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities

2013-14 2022 C M Lerici scholarship for studies in Italy, Swedish Institute, Rome

Organized conferences, workshops and conference sessions (selected)

2022 Heritagization & Religion in Early Modern Times. Exploring the disciplinary crossroads between heritage, museums, and history. Organized roundtable seminar with EMoDiR Research Group at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual conference, Dublin, March 2022. Initiator, organizer, and speaker.

2019 Vocabulary of Dissent. Panel with EmoDiR Research Group at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual conference, Toronto. Part of organizing committee.

2017 ISCH (International Society for Cultural History) conference Senses, Emotions and the Affective Turn, Umeå. Part of organizing committee.

2014 Session Authenticity and ambiguity. Facing sacred heritage and musealized sacredness. ACHS, Canberra. Part of organizing committee.

2014 International workshop Domesticating the Other. Sacred heritage and politics of religious control in Europe 1500-1900. Co-sponsored by EMoDiR research group. Swedish Institute in Rome. Part of organizing committee.

2013 International workshop Gender, Emotions and Material Culture in Scandinavian History. Umeå University. Part of organizing committee.

Media

I regularly participate in podcasts, debates and panel discussions, both within academia and the heritage field, as well as those aimed at a wider audience.

History Unfolds - Religion, Diversity and Museums. A conversation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyTtbNYfNCA&ab_channel=Historiskamuseet