Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre is professor of German literature at Stockholm University. She earned her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, USA, in 1992, with the dissertation Dargestellte Welt – reale Welt: Freundschaft, Liebe und Familie in den Prosawerken Georg Wickrams (Peter Lang, 1996). Since 1986, Wåghäll Nivre has taught Swedish and German at various universities in Sweden, Germany, and the USA, including Davidson College (1992–94), Högskolan Karlskrona-Ronneby (1994–95), Växjö University (1995–2012; Linneaus University since 2010), and Stockholm University (since 2004). Wåghäll Nivre has been invited speaker and guest lecturer at numerous universities and conferences in Europe and the USA. She was visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in the fall of 2024.

Wåghäll Nivre's research focuses on 16th and 17th-century German literature, with particular interest in the roles of women, marriage, and family life in early modern German literature. She has also explored early modern biographical writing, panegyrics, and travel narratives. Her smaller projects include publications on German children's literature, the teaching of literature in the foreign language classroom, and the use of multimedia in language and literature teaching. Her current research examines biographical writing on Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689).

Throughout her career, Wåghäll Nivre has supervised nearly twenty Ph.D. students on dissertation topics related to German literature and the teaching of literature in the foreign language classroom. Additionally, she has guided over one hundred B.A. and M.A. theses on various literary topics and has been involved in training teachers within the teacher training program.

She has served as the German editor of the journal Moderna språk and as the editor of the series Stockholm German and Dutch Studies. Wåghäll Nivre is a founding member of the association Germanistische Literaturwissenschaft in Schweden (GLS) as well as the international doctoral network PhDNet Literary and Cultural Studies and the international network Movens: Phänomene ästhetischer und kultureller Grenzüberschreitungen. Additionally, she has served on the board of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), and currently serves as a board member of The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society (WASP-HS) and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ). Since 2025 she is chairing the board of Stockholm University Press.

Wåghäll Nivre has held several administrative roles at Växjö University and Stockholm University. Most recently she served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Deputy Vice President for the Area of Human Science at Stockholm University from 2018 to 2023. In this position, she has also undertaken a variety of expert assignments in Sweden and internationally.