Anders Ahlbäck
About me
Title of Docent in Nordic history, PhD in history 2011, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
Research areas:
- masculinities in the 19th-20th centuries
- military gender history, conscription and defence policy
- agrarian masculinities and rural structural transformation (1940s-1960s)
- anti-fascism and ethnic minorities (1920s-1930s)
- university history (1960s–2000s)
My current research is about how notions of masculinity, honour and citizenship influenced early debates on universal conscription in the Scandinavian countries, circa 1800-1880. I am starting up new research on how young men in rural Sweden and Finland experienced the depopulation and structural transformation of agricultural society in the 1940s-1960s and how their experiences were shaped by agrarian masculinity.
My previous research has mainly focused on the gender history of conscription and defence policy in Finland, from the 1890s to the 1990s. Among other things, I have researched men's experiences and memory culture of military service, and how notions of femininity, ethnicity, citizenship and history have influenced various defence debates and decisions, from the establishment of Finland's first conscripted units to the decision on voluntary military service for women in 1995.
I have also researched anti-fascism among Swedish-speakers in Finland in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as higher education pedagogy and university governance mechanisms at Åbo Akademi University in the 1960s and 2000s.
Books and Special issues in English:
Anders Ahlbäck & Kasper Braskén, eds (2023), Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities : History and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge: London).
Julia Heinemann, Christine de Matos, Fia Sundevall & Anders Ahlbäck, eds. (2023), Gender, War and Coerced Labour, Special Issue of Labor History 64:3.
Anders Ahlbäck (2014), Manhood and the Making of the Military: Conscription and Masculinity in Finland, 1917–1939 (Ashgate: Farnham).
Anders Ahlbäck & Fia Sundevall, eds. (2014), Gender, War and Peace: Breaking up the Borderlines (University Press of Eastern Finland: Joensuu).
Anders Ahlbäck, Jarna Soilevuo Grönneröd, Ville Kivimäki, Teemu Tallberg & Johanna Valenius, eds. (2008), Men, Militaries and Civilian Societies in Interaction, Special Issue of Norma – Nordic Journal for Masculinity Studies 3:2.
Articles in English:
Anders Ahlbäck, Fia Sundevall Johanna & Hjertquist (2024), “A Nordic model of gender and military work? Labour demand, gender equality and women’s integration in the armed forces of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden”, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 72:1, 49–66.
Anders Ahlbäck & Kasper Braskén (2023), “Introduction; Divided against themselves? Ethnic Minorities, Nationalism and Fractured Anti-fascist Identities”, A. Ahlbäck & K. Braskén, eds, Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities : History and Memory in Central and Eastern Europé (Routledge: London), 1–16.
Anders Ahlbäck, Kasper Braskén, Matias Kaihovirta & Ylva Perera (2023), “The cohesive and dividing power of anti-fascism: Language and class among Finland-Swedes in the 1920s–1940s”, A. Ahlbäck & K. Braskén, eds, Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities : History and Memory in Central and Eastern Europé (Routledge: London), 75–91.
Anders Ahlbäck (2022), ’Changing views on gender and security: Finland's belated opening of military service to women in the 1990s’, Scandinavian Journal of History 47:2, 248–269.
Anders Ahlbäck (2018), ‘Masculinities and the Ideal Warrior – Images of the Jäger Movement’, Aapo Roselius & Tuomas Tepora, eds., The Finnish Civil War: History, Memory, Legacy (Brill: Leiden & Boston, 2014), 254–293.
Anders Ahlbäck (2018), ‘Unwelcome knowledge: Resistance to pedagogical knowledge in a university setting, circa 1965–2005’, Johan Östling, Erling Sandmo, David Larsson Heidenblad, Anna Nilsson Hammar & Kari Nordberg, red., Circulation of Knowledge (Lund: Nordic Academic Press), 125–143.
Anders Ahlbäck, Ville Kivimäki & Tuomas Tepora, ’Cult of heroes’, Renee C. Hoogland & Andrea Peto, red., Gender: War (Macmillan: Farmington Hills, 2017), 303–320.
Anders Ahlbäck & Laura Hollsten (2015), “Changing the narratives of university history”, Kasvatus ja Aika 9:3, 104–116.
Anders Ahlbäck (2015), “The Overly Candid Missionary Historian. C.G.A. Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies”, Holger Weiss, ed., Ports of Globalisation, Places of Creolisation: Nordic Possessions in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade (Brill: Leiden & Boston), 191–217.
‘Ethnicity, military service and male civic in/exclusion in Finland, 1918–1928’, Kathleen Starck & Birgit Sauer, red., Political Masculinities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2014), 53–66.
Senior lecturer in history