Cultural and Media History
Cultural theoretical research has become an integral part of our discipline. In terms of analytical perspectives such research focuses on the mechanisms and materialities of cultural meaning-making. This empirically broad field is characterized by a historical interest in values, emotions, and sensory experiences. The searchlight is directed at the micro-infrastructures of the everyday, the naturalization of what is taken for granted and to connections between the micro- and macro levels, for example by setting phenomena such as pressed flowers, coffee drinking, illustrations in newspapers, credit cards or training courses in sensuality in broader historical, political and social context.
Research at the department includes consideration of how the historically-changing ways in which the world is represented, in which knowledge is communicated and learning organized, has been tied to certain media preconditions and the development of specific media competences. Drawing on cultural theory, this research uses a broad concept of 'media' that includes far more than the traditional mass media. The academic lecture, the museum, the statistical diagram the x-ray photograph, as well as different forms of money for instance, have been analysed as parts of shifting mediascapes.

Cover to the magazine "Korrespondens", September 1951. Photo: Orsi Husz.
Current Research in Cultural and Media History
- Between Openness and Secrecy: Controlling Medical Communication in Twentieth Century Sweden
- The Business of Identity: Money and Identification in Twentieth Century Sweden
- Communicating Medicine: Digitalisation of Swedish Medical Periodicals, 1781–2011 (SweMPer)
- The Culture of International Society: Cultural Treaties and the Emergence of a Global Culture Concept, 1919–1972
- The Family Tree: A History of Scientific Imagination
- The Intimate Relationship: A Cultural Economic History of Everyday Finances
- Making a European People Visible: The Birth of Illustrated News and Transnational Political Subjectivity in the 1840s
- Merchants of Enlightenment: Making Knowledge Move Between England and Sweden, 1700–1772
- Neoliberalism as lived experience and everyday practice: The making of everyman’s capitalism
- Provenance in 19th-Century Europe: Research Practice and Concept
- Self-erasure and practices of motivated forgetting in nineteenth-century Britain
- Unmapping Africa: Enlightenment Geography and the Making of Blank Spaces