PhD projects

Emanuel Alenklint

Through a study of the book production of Förlaget Filadelfia, Alenklint explores the Swedish Pentecostal movement's use of history and changed historical consciousness from the 1910s–1970s. From being a movement that to a limited extent related to church history, the movement joined a pietistically tinged historiography in the spirit of Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), where the movement began to describe itself as the true church alongside the state church. The dissertation aims to describe the Pentecostal movement's changed self-image and how the movement in an increasingly secular society came to reevaluate its relationship to both the state church and Swedish society.

Erika Boije

En ny luthersk nation: Ideal och motbilder i Fältskärns berättelser av Zacharias Topelius. (A New Lutheran Nation: Ideals and Counter-Images in Surgeons’s Stories by Zacharias Topelius.) Boije studies church history themes in Zacharias Topelius's (1818–1898) series of novels Surgeons’s Stories (1853–1867). In the study, she analyses how Topelius formulates ideals and counter-images for Finnish nation-building, in which the Lutheran household serves as a model for Topelius's nation-building. The study sheds light on, among other things, how the household creates conditions and sets limits for gender relations, fertility, authority and tolerance within the nation, and how religious minorities are excluded from the national community where their absence from the household, both symbolically and socially, means exclusion from the nation as a whole. Boije defends her thesis 9/1 2026

Love Karlsson

Karlsson's project examines how the Swedish-American Augustana Synod got through the crises that arose in connection with the United States' entry into the First World War in 1917 and how theological political issues were debated in church contexts during the crisis years. The project is focused on three contemporary events: the First World War, the Spanish flu, and the economic crisis of 1920–1921.

Therese Tamm Selander

Tamm Selander's dissertation project deals with Mathilda Foy (1813–1869), an author of children's books. She devoted herself to missionary work in Stockholm with Sunday schools within the New Evangelical revival and her international travels and contacts also played an important role in this work.

Samuel Wenell

In his dissertation, Wenell studies the Swedish Israel Mission's activity in Vienna 1938–1941. The dissertation revolves around issues of leadership, organization and decision-making in the organization. Based on the concept of stewardship from studies of non-profit organizations, Wenell examines how the mission's management subordinated decisions regarding finances, personnel and activities to the overall mission to conduct missions to Jews.

Philip Widell

In his thesis project, Widell examines the nearly 600 men belonging to the Church of England, who were active as field chaplains within the Royal Airforce during the Second World War. He examines their mission, how they carried it out, the tensions that existed between their roles as priests and officers, and how they and their efforts were interpreted by contemporaries and by posterity.