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Helena WulffProfessor emerita

About me

Helena Wulff is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research interests include expressive cultural form (dance, art, images, text) in a transnational perspective. Key engagements are in the anthropologies of literature and writing. Her recent research was on writing as craft and career in Ireland.

Current research evolves around migrant writing in Sweden. This emerges out of the major multidisciplinary research programme ”Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures” funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. She has conducted field studies in Stockholm, London, New York, Frankfurt-am-Main, and Ireland (mostly Dublin).

Helena Wulff has held visiting professorships at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National University of Singapore, University of Vienna, and University of Ulster, as well as a Leverhulme visiting professorship at University of East London. She was Chair of the Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT), Editor-in-Chief (with Dorle Dracklé) of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale: The Journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), and President of Society for Humanistic Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association.

Helena Wulff was a judge for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Convenor for the 15th Biannual European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference at Stockholm University in 2018. She presented the Stockholm University Professorial Inaugural Lecture at the Stockholm City Hall, and the Phyllis Kaberry Commemorative Lecture, University of Oxford.  

Currently Helena Wulff is editor (with Deborah Reed-Danahay) of the book series “Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology” and editor (with Jonathan Skinner) of the book series “Dance and Performance Studies” published by Berghahn. She is a member of the editorial advisory boards of the journals Anthropologica, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (AJEC), AnthroVision, Cultural Sociology, OtherwiseMag, and Social Anthropology.

Among Helena Wulff’s books are the three monographs Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers (1998), Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland (2007), and  Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (2017). There are also the edited volumes Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (with Vered Amit-Talai, 1995), New Technologies at Work: People, Screens and Social Virtuality (with Christina Garsten, 2003), The Emotions: A Cultural Reader (2007), Ethnographic Practice in the Present (with Marit Melhuus and Jon P. Mitchell, 2010), The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century (2016), World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange (with Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, and Yvonne Lindqvist, 2018), and Claiming Space: Locations and Orientations in World Literature (with Bo G. Ekelund and Adnan Mahmutović, 2022).

Journal articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, Anthropology & Humanism, Body & Society, Choreographic Encounters, Ethnologie française, Ethnography, Identities, Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement (JASHM), Nordic Irish Studies, OtherwiseMag, Social Anthropology, and The Senses & Society. She has written book chapters in many edited volumes, and entries in a number of encyclopedias. Drawing on her research, she also occasionally writes anthropological journalism, as well as autofiction and creative nonfiction.

 

Selected and Recent Publications

2023    

2022

2018

  • World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange  Stockholm University Press Editor with Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, and Yvonne Lindqvist 

2017

2016

 

Journal articles, Book chapters, Enyclopedia entries

2023

   •  “Response: Calling for Creative Ethnography," Cultural         Analysis Vol. 21(1): 56-58.    https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~culturalanalysis/volume21_1/ v ol21_1 Response.html      

 

2022

  • "Editorial Coda: Autobiography in Anthropology, Then and Now,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures Volume 31, No. 2 (2022): v-x © The Author(s) doi: 10.3167/ajec.2022.310201 ISSN 1755-2923 (Print) 1755-2931 (Online).
  • ”Gifts, Unwanted and Ungiven,” Anthropology & Humanism Vol. 47(2): 402– 408. https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12394  
  •  ”Platser,” in Stefan Helgesson (ed.), Världslitteraturer: Kosmopolitisk och vernakulär dynamik. Slutrapport från ett forskningsprogram. Stockholm: Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences with Santéus Publisher, pp. 47-60.
  • ”Ambiguous Arrival: Emotions and Dislocations in the Migrant Encounter with Sweden, ” in Bo G. Ekelund, Adnan Mahmutović, and Helena Wulff (eds.), Claiming Space: Locations and Orientations in World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 217-235. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501374135.ch-008

2021

2020                                                                                                     

  • ”Why Irish? The Use of Irish in the Work of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne,” in Ullrich Kockel, Philip McDermott, and Liam Campbell (eds.), Per Scribendum, Sumus: Ethnopoesis, or: Writing Heritage. Berlin: LIT Verlag, pp. 82-86.
  • ”Abortion in Ireland – From the Swedish Point of View,” in Forum on Irish Referendum, Social Anthropology, Vol. 28(4): 14-15.
  • ”Foreword,” in Cicilie Fagerlid and Michelle A. Tisdel (eds.), A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging: Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. vii-xii.

2019

  • ”Writing Truth to Power: Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Work in Stockholm and New York,” Anthropology &Humanism, Vol. 44(1): 7–19.

2018

  • ”Disaporic Divides: Location and Orientations of ’Home’ in Pooneh Rohi’s Araben,” in Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff (eds.), World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, pp. 119-128. https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.k
  • ”Diversifying from Within: Diaspora Writings in Sweden,” in Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport (eds.), The Composition of Anthropology: How Anthropological Texts are Written. London: Routledge, pp. 122-136.
  • ”Foreword,” in Lauren Miller Griffith and Jonathan S. Marion (eds.), Apprenticeship Pilgrimage: Developing Expertise through Travel and Training. New York: Lexington Books, pp. vii-xi.

2017

  • ”Stories of the Soil: In the Irish Literary World,” in Diarmuid Ó Giolláin and Martine Segalen (eds.), Irish Ethnologies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 141-157.
  • ”Greater than Its Size: Ireland in Literature and Life,” in Ulf Hannerz and Andre Gingrich (eds.), Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 301-316.    
  • ”Manhattan as a Magnet: Place and Circulation among Young Swedes,” in Virginia R. Dominguez and Jasmin Habib (eds.), America Observed: On an International Anthropology of the United States. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 31-50.

2016

2015

  • ”In Favour of Flexible Forms: Multi-Sited Fieldwork,” in Forum: Re-thinking Euro-Anthropology. Social Anthropology, 23(3): 355-357.
  • ”The Pains and Peaks of Being a Ballerina in London,” in Ilana Gershon (ed.), A World of Work: Imagined Manuals for Real Jobs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 207-220.
  • ”Ireland in the World, the World in Ireland,” American Anthropologist, 117(1): 142-143.
  • ”Dance, Anthropology of,” in James D. Wright (ed-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol. 5. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 666-670.

 

Media and Interviews

 

 

 

 

 

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange

    2018. .

    Book (ed)

    Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange.

    As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the one-sided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market.

    How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values?

    Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.

    Read more about World Literatures

  • Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature

    2017. Helena Wulff.

    Book

    This is the first antrhopological study of writers, writing and conteporary literary culture. Drawing on the flourishing literary scene in Ireland as a basis, Helena Wulff explores the social world of contemporary irish writers, examining fiction, novels, shorts stories as well as journalism. 

    The making of a writer's career is built on the "rhythms of writing": long hours of writing in solitude alternate with public events such as book readings and media appearances.  

    Read more about Rhythms of Writing

  • The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century

    2016. .

    Book (ed)

    Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21th century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts anthropologists actually engage with. Second, this book argues for the usefulness and necessity of taking seriously the idea of writing as a craft and of writing across and within genres in new ways. Although academic writing is an anthropologist's primary genre, they also write in many others, from drafting administrative texts and filing reports to composing ethnographically inspired journalism and fiction.

    Read more about The Anthropologist as Writer

  • Gifts, Unwanted and Ungiven

    2022. Helena Wulff. Anthropology and Humanism 47 (2), 402-408

    Article

    Against a backdrop of gift-giving and reciprocity as keys in building and confirming social relationships in the field, this fictional narrative reveals a string of gift-giving events that did not work out. This outcome is rarely reported on in anthropology, but here one gift was returned immediately, another promised but never produced. There is also the anti-climactic nature of a parting gift when it is time for the fieldworker to exit the field. The setting is Dublin’s literary world, and the fieldwork includes a number of appreciated gifts, though not always in the form of an equal exchange of objects. The occurrence of unwanted and ungiven gifts that recur through the narrative are thorny reminders of the fragility of friendship in the field. The characters in the narrative are composite except for cameo appearances of named writers. 

    Read more about Gifts, Unwanted and Ungiven

  • Writing Anthropology

    2021. Helena Wulff.

    Other

    Writing is key in anthropology, as one of its main modes of communication. Teaching, research, publications, and outreach all build on, or consist of, writing. This entry traces how anthropological writing styles have evolved over time according to changing politics in the discipline. It starts out in the late nineteenth century, showing how early writings in the discipline aimed to be objective. While writing anthropology in a literary mode goes a long way back, it was not until the 1970s that writing began to be collectively acknowledged as a craft to be cultivated in the discipline. This led to a boom of experimental ethnographic writing from the 1980s, as part of the ‘writing culture’ debate. The idea behind experimental narratives was that they might convey social life more accurately than conventional academic writing. Today, literary production and culture continue to be a source of inspiration for anthropologists, as well as a topic of study. Anthropological writing ranges from creative nonfiction to memoirs, journalism, and travel writing. Writing in such non-academic genres can be a way to make anthropological approaches and findings more widely known, and can inspire academic writing to become more accessible. Recent developments in anthropological writings include collaborative text production with interlocutors and artists. However, the tendency for experimentation is also held in check, as publishing in academic publication formats and featuring in citation indices is crucial for anthropologists’ careers. Still, as our writing moves increasingly online, there is a growth of flexible formats for publishing, including online books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals.

    Read more about Writing Anthropology

  • Writing Truth to Power: Jonas Khemiri’s Work in Stockholm and New York

    2019. Helena Wulff. Anthropology and Humanism 44 (1), 7-19

    Article

    This article explores the work of Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri, of partly Tunisian origin, in terms of cultural translation and comparison between Stockholm and New York. I discuss three texts by Khemiri in different writing genres: first, an open letter to Sweden’s Minister of Justice, which went viral in 2013 and was also published in the New York Times , about racial profiling in Stockholm; second, the play I Call My Brothers , written in response to a failed terrorist attack in Stockholm in 2010 and staged in New York; third, the award‐winning novel Everything I Don’t Remember (2016b) selected as a 2016 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year by Joyce Carol Oates. Why would Khemiri’s open letter, play, and novel that address new issues of power, stereotypes, and physical appearance in Sweden matter in the United States, with its deep‐rooted diversity? The conclusion is that the international success of these pieces has nothing to do with Sweden or an interest in Swedish contemporary life but can be understood as local variations on the global themes of terrorist crimes and racial profiling.

    Read more about Writing Truth to Power

  • Disaporic Divides: Location and Orientations of "Home" in Pooneh Rohi's Araben

    2018. Helena Wulff. World literatures, 119-128

    Chapter

    This chapter draws on a literary anthropological project which explores the social world of the young generation of diaspora writers and their work (fiction, plays, journalism) in Sweden. It uncovers experiences of racism in a country which boasts an ethnically inclusive policy while identifying instances of literary cosmopolitanism from within. Pooneh Rohi´s novel The Arab (2013) circles around the idea of home in terms of homelessness, and the designation “stranger” as the protagonist leads his lonely life in snow-covered Stockholm where he moved decades ago from Iran. For “the Arab” is actually Persian, but is taken to be an Arab in the Swedish context. Sweden is not home to him, he is homeless in his heart. A young woman in the novel is also from Iran, but she is so well integrated that people think she was adopted. Her childhood memories from Iran are now a mirage from the past, a fading scent of salt from the sea. Later, her longing for “that part of the room that is invisible in the mirror” gets stronger.

    Read more about Disaporic Divides

  • Diversifying from Within: Diaspora Writings in Sweden

    2018. Helena Wulff. The Composition of Anthropology, 122-136

    Chapter

    Helena Wulff´s chapter begins with an essay drawing on her ongoing literary anthropological study of diaspora fiction writers and their work in Sweden who, she argues, are diversifying the country from within. The essay engages with the work of Pooneh Rohi born in Iran, who is a new voice while Jonas Hassen Khemiri, of Tunisian background, is an established writer. In addition to writing fiction, they sometimes do journalism. By uncovering often cruel experiences of racism in a country which boasts an inclusive policy, yet has an expanding anti-immigration party (the Sweden Democrats) diaspora writers have an impact on political and cultural debate in Sweden, also because they take on the role as public intellectuals. In her Commentary, Wulff explains how Text came about, how it goes back to her intellectual history that was founded during her upbringing when she first became a habitual reader, and later with her education in comparative literature and anthropology that eventually would make her an anthropological writer. Inspired by her research on the ballet world where desire and technique are key for creativity to spring up, Wulff suggests that this is the case in anthropological writing, as well. As to the recent genealogy of the essay, it is an account of preparations for a major multi-disciplinary research program on world literatures which was funded in 2016.      

    Read more about Diversifying from Within

  • Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer: Across and Within Genres

    2016. Helena Wulff. The Anthropologist as Writer, 1-18

    Chapter

    Taking existing conversations in anthropology as a point of departure, the mission of this volume is twofold: first, to identify different writing genres that anthropologists actually engage with; second, to argue for the usefulness and necessity for anthropologists of taking  writing as a craft seriously and of writing across and within genres in new ways. This introductory chapter contextualizes anthropological writing historically and theoretically, moves on to my own experience of writing cultural (dance) journalism as one instance of broadening anthropological writing, and concludes by offering an overview of ways of writing anthropology as discussed in the following chapters: in relation to the making of an anthropological career, ethnographic writing, journalistic and popular writing, and writing across genres. 

    Read more about Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer

  • Jazz i Ghana: musik som kosmopolitism

    2015. Helena Wulff. Kulturella perspektiv - Svensk etnologisk tidskrift 24 (2), 34-38

    Article
    Read more about Jazz i Ghana

  • Dance, Anthropology of

    2015. Helena Wulff. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 666-670

    Chapter

    Dance as a topic for systematic anthropological investigation was established in the 1960s. As the Western category of dance did not always work in a cross-cultural perspective, bounded rhythmical movements were identified, as well as dance events. Dance is an expression of wider social and cultural situations, often indicating transition or conflict, as well as unity. Dance anthropologists study all forms of dance, Western and non-Western, ranging from ritual dance and social dance to streetdance and staged dance performance. Dance and movement are understood in relation to theories of the body and gender, and to ethnicity, nationalism, and transnationality.

    Read more about Dance, Anthropology of

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