About me

I am professor of history and interested in Nordic political history, from the early modern period to the 1900s.

Teaching

I’ve been teaching history at Stockholm university since 2001 on undergraduate, masters and doctoral level.

Research

My main subject is the political history of the early modern period, in Sweden and Scandinavia. I focus on how rulers struggled to implement their policies, and how ordinary people met their measures with various forms of resistance. I have studied the relations between bailiffs and peasants in sixteenth century Sweden, tax farming during the period of the Thirty Years war, royal propaganda as well as war, masculinity and organised violence.

In recent years, I have broadened my research interest; investigating private–public relations in a long-term perspective. In the research project “Self interest versus the common good”, my colleague Magnus Linnarsson and I analysed political conflicts concerning the organization of the public services in Sweden from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century. My part of the project focused on the capital city of Stockholm, and included case-studies of street lighting by contract in the age of liberty, public sanitation workers c. 1850, municipal tramways after the turn of the century 1900 and the privatisation of services for old people in the late twentieth century.

I currently work on two externally financed research projects: “Shifting Regimes: Representation, administrative reform and institutional change in early modern Sweden” address regime shifts in early modern Sweden and their impact on state administration and political representation, respectively. “Alternative Paths to the Welfare City: Public Services, Inclusion and the Common Good in Nordic Capital Cities 1870–1920” compares political discourses and analysse the incentives for investing in municipal public services.

I have also, together with Kimmo Katajala (Univ. of Eastern Finland) and Knut Dørum (Univ of Agder, Norway) initiated the Nordic research network ”State-Building from Below in the Nordic Countries, c. 1500–1800”. We have organised several workshops and conference sessions, and a joint volume was published by Routledge in 2021.