Jakob Kihlberg

Short presentation

My research focuses on political culture, media history and visual culture during the nineteenth century.

Present research project: "Pictorial Time Machines: Nineteenth Century Illustrated News Magazines in Sweden and the Making of a Modern Present".

Research

My research focuses on political culture, media history and visual culture during the nineteenth century.

My dissertation, Gränslösa anspråk: Offentliga möten och skapandet av det internationella [Boundless claims: Public meetings and the making of the international] (2018), investigated how the international as a phenomenon took shape in the middle of the nineteenth century. The book is based on three case studies of early international congresses and focuses on how they were mediated for audiences in different countries.

Present project:

Pictorial Time Machines: Nineteenth Century Illustrated News Magazines in Sweden and the Making of a Modern Present

In this project I will investigate how illustrate news magazines in Sweden mediated time during the second half of the nineteenth century. The hypothesis is that they contributed to a modern sense of time as a fast forward movement by establishing contemporary occurrences as historical events - and thus the present as eventful - with pictorial means.

Project duration

2025–2026

Funding

Ridderstads stiftelse för historisk grafisk forskning

Finished projects:

Making a European People Visible

The Birth of Illustrated News and Transnational Political Subjectivity in the 1840’s

How “people” come to identify as part of “the people”, in the sense of those that have a legitimate say in political matters in society, is in many ways a central question of our time. It is also a question with historical roots that go back to the constitution of modern democratic societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this research project the people as a political subject is investigated through an analysis of how illustrated news magazines, that were established in several European countries during the 1840’s, contributed to new ways of imagining this collective.

The study investigated both how illustrated news magazines pictured public gatherings of people as expressions of a popular will, and how readers were in different ways positioned as part of a collective with legitimate interests in the business of government. The results indicated that the establishment of a market for visual news during this period, might for the first time have made it possible for influential groups to (literally) see themselves as participating in the life of a transnational European people.

Project duration

2020–2024

Funding

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond