Here is a record of recent talks and conferences I have participated in, with thanks to those who invited me and those who participated.
2024
Symposium
Join me on Friday, February 16 for an online symposium on Digital approaches to the history of European & international cooperation, coordinated by Haakon A. Ikonomou (University of Copenhagen). Things get started at 13:30 CET; see you there!
2023
“Words and Violence” in Paris
October 30: I am just back from the workshop of the research project “Words and Violence: Literary Intellectuals between Democracy and Dictatorship, 1933-1952,” which took place in Paris on October 24-25. Many thanks to the organizers of this exciting project for having me!
Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) 2023
On 8 March, at this year’s (online-only) DHNB conference, I presented a paper that I am co-writing with Fredrik Norén, “Nature and Culture in the Age of Environmental Crisis: Digital Analysis of a Global Debate in The UNESCO Courier, 1948-2011.”
Digital Conceptual History: Workshop in Uppsala
On 8 March in Uppsala I participated in a workshop on Digital History of Concepts, featuring presentations by Jani Marjanen (University of Helsinki), Fredrik Mohammadi Norén (Malmö University), Elin Åström Rudberg (Uppsala), and Karl Berglund (Uppsala).
AHA 2023
On 6 January I presented a paper at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, on a panel I co-organized, entitled “Decolonizing the International Order: UNESCO’s Radical 1970s in Historical Perspective.” My paper: “Decolonizing “Culture”? Negotiating the Culture Concept at UNESCO, 1966–82.” Thanks to my fellow participants and everyone who attended (at 8:30 in the morning, no less!).
2022
Digital methods workshop
On 24 November I will be one of the presenters in a special workshop on using digital methods for the history of science and ideas, along with Jacob Orrje and Elin Åström Rudberg, at Uppsala University, Dept of History of Science and Ideas, Building 6, Rausingrummet, at 1:15 pm. A chance to talk about the pleasures and perils of the kind of work I’ve been up to lately…
Digital History in Sweden 2022
On Nov 14, I gave a paper at the 5th “Digital History in Sweden” conference, hosted this time at Lund University. My paper was entitled, “Negotiating the Culture Concept at UNESCO, 1966–1982: Global conceptual history through digital text analysis.” Many thanks to my fellow participants and especially to the organizers.
New term, new tasks
This fall term (2022) I begin a three-year stint as director of undergraduate studies (studierektor för grundutbildning) at the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. (Wish me luck!)
Workshop!
Thanks to everyone who joined in on June 7 in Uppsala for a workshop on “Cultures of 20th-Century Cultural Diplomacy”! Serving as a kind of ceremonial conclusion of my RJ project on the history of bilateral cultural agreements, the workshop featured presentations from Charlotte Faucher, Eleonory Gilburd and Nikolas Glover, and moderation from Susanna Erlandsson. Thanks, as ever, to Riksbanksens jubileumsfond for supporting this event.
New Publication!
My latest article, “The Rise of the Cultural Treaty: Diplomatic Agreements and the International Politics of Culture in the Age of Three Worlds,” has just been published in the International History Review. Many thanks to Roger and Andreas at Humlab, as well as to all the many people I’ve talked with about these treaties—and how tricky it is to count them—over the past few years!
Conferences again! (Spring 2022)
On Friday, March 18, I presented at the annual Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries conference (DHNB 2022) in Uppsala, with a paper entitled, “Digital Analysis of Global Debates: Text Mining the UNESCO Courier, 1948-2011.”
On Monday, March 21, I spoke on a panel about the status and future of liberal arts education in Sweden, as part of the series Bildningens nya vägar at Uppsala University.
Then, on April 8, I presented a paper at the international conference of the History of Concepts Group in Berlin. My paper there is called, “International Ideas at UNESCO: Digital Approaches for Global Conceptual History.”
Finally, on May 7 I gave a talk as part of the celebration of the career of my PhD supervisor, Victoria de Grazia at Columbia University in New York. (Here is a film, via zoom, of my panel, along with Celia Donert and Mehmet Dösemeci, moderated by Dominique Reill!)
Seminar presentation (February 2022)
On February 22, I presented a paper at the higher seminar of Uppsala University’s department of Musicology: “The Sound(s) of World Peace: On the Intellectual History of Music at UNESCO.”
2021
Research presentations (October 2021)
On Thursday, Oct 14, at the seminar of Uppsala University’s Department of History of Science and Ideas, I presented the article Fredrik Norén and I have been writing: “The Culture Concept in UNESCO’s Standard-Setting Instruments: A Digital Approach to Global Conceptual History.”
Thanks also to the participants in Humlab’s excellent research group for sharp feeback on the same paper, which Fredrik and I discussed there on September 28.
A New Book Review (May 2021)
"One comes away from this book reminded that for many Italian intellectuals, fascism was the way they participated in a European-wide rethinking of the core relationships of modernity: between capital and labour, nation and state, individual and collective, market forces and state power.” — My review of Nicola D’Elia, Giuseppe Bottai e la Germania nazista (Rome: Carocci, 2019) has been published in The Journal of Modern Italian Studies.
New article, new intro, new blog posts (March 2021)
The historian Elisabeth Piller and I have co-edited a special issue of the journal Contemporary European History, and the articles are (at last!) coming out, many of them accompanied by posts on the blog of Cambridge University Press. We have written a blog post about our introduction to the special issue as a whole, and here is the introduction itself (open access). My own article in the special issue, “The Birth of the Cultural Treaty in Europe’s Age of Crisis” has been published (also open access), and has its own snappy blog post, as well.
Many thanks to Ludivine Broch and the rest of the editorial team at Contemporary European History, to our contributors, and to Elisabeth! (Thanks also to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for funding the research!)
Presentation at Newcastle
On 17 March, I presented an article-in-progress in the Modern European History Seminar at Newcastle University. Well, via zoom. The tentative title: “The Rise of the Cultural Treaty: Diplomatic Agreements and the Politics of ‘Culture’ in the Age of Three Worlds.” See the Seminar’s blog for information on the article and to sign up to participate. (Many thanks to Daniel Siemens for the invitation, and to the participants for very helpful feedback!)
2020
Blogging about our UNESCO project
A short piece of mine, about the research project I (along with Fredrik Norén and colleagues at Humlab in Umeå) began earlier this year, is now up on the Digital Humanities Uppsala Blog.
Good News from 2020
I accepted a position as universitetslektor (associate professor, more or less) in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University (!). Very pleased to become a member of the department on this new, more permanent basis.
Book prize!
My book has been awarded the 2020 Culbert Family Book Prize for Publications on Media History dealing with Propaganda, Mass Persuasion and Public Opinion, of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST). The prize, which honors the life and work of the path-breaking media historian David Culbert, is awarded by the IAMHIST Council and the editorial board of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
Two talks in Helsinki
On February 27, 2020, I presented two papers at the University of Helsinki. First, I gave a public guest lecture in the Centre for Nordic Studies’ course Interwar Modernities, called “Modernism and Modernity in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: A Reevaluation in Three Episodes”
Then, I went to Helsinki’s Digital Humanities Research Seminar and presented a paper entitled “What was the ‘culture’ of cultural treaties?: Digital text analysis for the intellectual history of 20th-century international relations”
2019
On November 14 I presented a paper from my on-going research at the seminar at Uppsala University’s Department of History of Science and Ideas. The paper is about using digital text analysis to study the international history of the culture concept.
Nov 4, 2019: I am delighted to report that the Swedish Research Council (VR) has awarded me a three-year research grant for my new project, International Ideas at UNESCO: Digital Approaches to Global Conceptual History. The project, which I will run in cooperation with Humlab Umeå and in which I am joined by the media scholar Fredrik Norén, will begin in Spring 2020. More on this soon!
June 2019: Two new articles!
First, my article on how fascist Italian intellectuals promoted their arts policy internationally is now out (and free to download): “Fascist Italy’s Illiberal Cultural Networks: Culture, Corporatism and International Relations,” in L. Cerasi, ed., Genealogie e geografie dell’anti-democrazia nella crisi europea degli anni Trenta (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2019): 137-158.
And…my article on the role of visual arts in Nazi Germany’s plans for a cultural new order was also recently published: “The Art of Nazi International Networking: The Visual Arts in the Rhetoric and Reality of Hitler’s European New Order,” in M. Björkman, P. Lundell, and S. Widmalm, eds., Intellectual Collaboration with the Third Reich: Treason or Reason? (London: Routledge, 2019).
May 6: I gave a paper at the conference Culture and International History VI in Berlin, at the Free University’s John F. Kennedy Center. This year’s theme was “Visions of Humanity.” My paper was called “Cultural Diplomacy against Humanity: the Geopolitical Visions of Interwar Cultural Treaties.”
March 13: I participated in a public conversation on the landscape of the digital humanities coordinated by DH Stockholm (a joint initiative of the National Library of Sweden and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology). Have a look.
2018
December 11: I presented a paper in the Higher Seminar of my own department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University.
November 5: I presented in the History of Ideas seminar series at Södertörn University, giving a paper entitled, “The Rise of the Cultural Treaty: Charting the Role of ‘Culture' in Twentieth-Century International Relations (or, Applying digital humanities methods to intellectual history is trickier than I expected).” Thanks to all who came for a highly productive discussion.
Sept 25: Together with Roger Mähler and Johan Jarlbrink of Umeå University, I participated in a workshop on digital text analysis at Södertörn University’s department of Media and Communication Studies. I presented an overview of how we will be using these methods in my project, “The Culture of International Society.”
May 15: My first keynote (!), opening the International workshop on Film distribution, exhibition and consumption in the Second World War, was at KU Leuven, Belgium. Thanks to Roel Vande Winkel and the participants in this interesting workshop.
April 25: I presented a paper from my new project (Cultural treaties and the emergence of a global culture concept) at the seminar of Lund University's section for History of science and ideas.
March 15: since the faculty of the University of Manchester were on strike, I held an informal talk, on the “culture” of fascist cultural internationalism, off campus at lunch time. Thanks to everyone who came out!
March 9: I presented a paper, "Charting the ’Culture’ of Cultural Treaties: Digital Humanities approaches to the history of international ideas," at the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN) conference in Helsinki.
2017
November 21: I presented the book for students of the University of Udine - University of Trieste joint PhD program in History and Philosophy, in Udine, Italy.
October 24: I presented the book at Stockholm University, Department of History: 3:30 pm, room D900.
October 20: I discussed the "European literature of the Nazi New Order" at Stockholm University's Dept of Culture and Aesthetics: 2 pm.
October 9: I presented the paper "Nazi-Fascist Europeanism: What it was and why we should take it seriously," as part of the Euroculture Lecture Series at the University of Groningen.
September 7: I presented the book at Södertörn University, Stockholm.
June 12: I discussed the book at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, in the Research Seminar Series led by Prof. Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, co-sponsored by Prof. Martin Geyer and Prof. Margit Szöllösi-Janze: 6 - 8 pm, LMU Historicum, Amalienstr. 52, Raum K001.
June 7: I presented a paper on the German-Italian-Japanese Axis interpreted through the history of international cultural relations, at the conference "The Axis Alliance in Global Perspective," Konstanz University.
May 29: I discussed the book at the Freie-Universität, Berlin, in a Research Seminar session (Forschungscolloquium zur Vergleichs- und Verflechtungsgeschichte) co-sponsored by Prof. Arnd Bauerkämper and Prof. Oliver Janz.
April 27, 5 pm: I discussed the book at Stockholm's Filmhuset, in conversation with the film scholar Anna-Sofia Rossholm. Then, at 6 pm, I introduced a screening of Die Große Liebe (The Great Love, 1942), Nazi Germany's no. 1 box office hit.
Mini-Book Tour of Tuscany!
March 22: I discussed the book at University of Pisa (Dipartimento di Civiltà e forme del sapere).
March 23: I participated in the panel discussion "Rethinking Dictatorship: Latin Europe in the Interwar Period", European University Institute, Fiesole.