Architecture, landscape architecture and design

Art History has a long tradition of engaging in research and teaching about historical and contemporary architecture, landscape architecture and design, as individual objects, interiors and city planning.

Children's and young adult Literature

Comparative and transnational perspectives in and on literature

The writing and reading of literature have always been itinerant and transitional phenomena. Shaped by multidirectional flows of cultural influences, literary production and reception transcend national and linguistic borders, making the world’s literary histories profoundly intertwined.

Critical editions

Critical theatre historiography

Critical historiography combines critical conceptual approaches to theatre, dance and performance history with thorough archival research and source interpretation.

Cultural History

Cultural history deals with broad themes and long chronologies. Researchers in this field are united by an interest in meaning-making, symbols, materiality and cultural practices. There is also an interest in memory cultures and critical heritage studies.

Cultural politics

The focus of research on cultural politics is the role of the performing arts in politics with a special focus on audience research.

Dance and movement

The focus of the discipline’s research is on dance presented onstage, but it cannot be studied without also capturing the interest in physical movement from a broader socio-political and media perspective.

Dramaturgy

The interplay of room-body-text-movement are central elements in the dramaturgy of classical, modern and postmodern theatre. This relationship can be constructed in fundamentally different ways and the production of meaning - abstract or concrete - is turned towards the spectator with an invitation to be both playful and serious.

Early modern art

The early modern period stretches from the mid 15th century to around 1800 and covers the art historical styles of Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism.

Environmental Humanities

Within Environmental Humanities, researchers investigate relationships between humans and animals, and between humans and the environment, now and in the past.

Ethnomusicology

Feminist and queer performing arts

One of the research areas of Theatre Studies is feminist and queer performing arts with a transnational and intersectional outlook.

Gender perspectives in and on literature

Gender perspectives on art

Gender research in Art History is characterised by critical perspectives on art and art history.

Historiography

Historiography can mean "writing history" or "writing history about historiography". Most often, historiography involves meta-historical studies of other, past or contemporary, historical studies.

History of costume

Set design, objects, puppets and not least costume are growing research areas in Theatre Studies.

History of Knowledge

Historians of ideas at Stockholm Universityresearch historical forms of knowledge and expertise, encyclopaedias and the history of the knowledge system since the 18th century, the history of medicine and psychiatry, and the role of emotions in scientific work.

History of Philosophy

The history of philosophy studies philosophical problems through their history and connection to literature, art or politics.

History of Political Ideas

The history of political ideas deals with questions about political identity and emotions, but also with the history of ideologies and political concepts, for example the political potential of myth in feminism. The political is treated as the effect of long historical lines but also as crucial to current political debate.

Intercultural and decolonial performing arts

Intercultural and postcolonial performing arts aim to produce knowledge about theatre, dance and performance outside the Euro-centric cultural area, from both an historical and a contemporary perspective.

Literature and Philosophy

Modern literary analysis is often inspired by and engaged in philosophical questions and theories. Philosophy has, one might say, provided many different theoretical frameworks for literary studies.

Materiality

Materiality studies within Art History investigates effects and meanings of the physically material aspects of works of art, buildings and other objects of study in art science.

Media, materiality and literature

Media History

Media history deals with the relationship between different forms of media, and the materiality of media, in a historical perspective.

Modern and contemporary art

A central theme for researchers at the art history department is modern and contemporary art in transnational, cultural-political, network- and gender-related perspectives.

Modern and Contemporary literature

Music and Media

Music History

Musicology of record production

Music Theory and Music Analysis

Opera and musical

One of the research areas of Musicology and Theatre Studies is opera and music theater, which is analysed from an interdisciplinary and cross-aesthetic perspective that puts focus on the interplay of text, music, staging and musical-scenic performance.

Performativity

Research on performativity examines how art and architecture affect the world, rather than what it represents or how it came about.

Photography

Popular Music

Posthumanism and Ecocritisism

Posthumanist and Ecocritical perspectives are prominent within the research field of Literary Studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University.

Pre- and early modern literature

Research in pre- and early modern literature is a prominent field within Literary Studies at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics.

Theatre for children and young people

One of the main research areas within Theatre Studies is theatre for children and young people. Themes and topics as well as their onstage presentation constitute the focus for the department's research.

The historicity and historiography of literature

The theatrical event

"The theatrical event" is a research model that assumes that theatre and performance, in the broadest sense of the term, take place as a meeting between performers and spectators.

Visual culture

Visual culture covers research about image cultures and visual practices in different historical contexts and from different theoretical perspectives. The field includes the traditional objects of art history in wider visual contexts.