Karin Sennefelt
Contact
Name and title: Karin Sennefelt
Phone: +468163314
ORCID0000-0002-3654-9770 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: Department of History Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room D 956Universitetsvägen 10 D, plan 8 och 9
Postal address Historiska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
About me
I obtained my doctorate at Uppsala Univeristy in 2001, did a postdoc at University of California, Los Angeles in 2007-2008, and became docent in 2010. In 2014, I became professor of history at Stockholm University.
I am a cultural and social historian of the early modern Swedish realm with an emphasis on the history of the everyday, social practices, materiality, dissent, eating and the body. In a new project I will be working on how food decisions and nourishing substances shaped individual bodies and the body politic in early modern Sweden.
My recent work studies the significance of corporeal religious experience for understanding how the early modern world worked: The Word made Flesh: Lutheran Bodies, 1600–1720(Routledge, 2025) and Livet enligt 1600-talet (Natur & Kultur, 2026).
I have served as chair of the Swedish Research Council's review panel HS-I for Historical disciplines and archaeology in 2017-2019 and later became a member of its Scientific Council, 2022-2025. Since 2023 I am a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities .
Uppsala University's Prize for Excellence in Teaching, 2006.
Coordinator of the Faculty of Humanties Doctoral School on Corporeality in Theory and Practice, 2016-2018
Director of studies for the PhD program
The Word made Flesh: the Body in Protestant Culture, c. 1600–1750
The purpose of the project is to study the connection between religion and the lived-in-body between 1600 and 1750. We intend to examine how the early modern religious world-view influenced the body, and how the body in turn shaped religious experience. The body was involved in all kinds of existential conflicts in religious life: between good and evil, life and death, the body could be fallen or redeemed. Through three separate case studies on the influence of the word of God on the body, on the somatic and emotional reactions to sin, and on the body as the teller of truth, it will be possible to reach an understanding of a lay embodiment of Protestantism. Our focus on the living body leads to an investigation of sources of power, as they were utilized by ordinary people: bodies laid claims to truth, spiritual connectedness and transcendence in a way that words did not. In so doing, corporeal experience shaped not only religious and emotional practice, but understanding of the world and how it worked.
2016-2019, funded by the Swedish Research Council
Karin Sennefelt (PI), Department of History, Stockholm University
Anton Runesson, Department of History, Stockholm University