My teaching includes art history and visual studies on ground- and advanced level. As a teacher, I have mainly been involved in the courses Visual studies, Art history I, Art history II and the Bachelor’s course in art history, in which I teach theory and method and supervise student theses. Additionally, I am director of the Bachelor’s programme in art history.

Ongoing research project

My ongoing research project, Pictorial Knowledge and Lantern Lectures in the 19th-Century Media Culture (2024–27) investigates how a new type of public lectures with projected images, lantern lectures, was established in the broader media culture of the later 19^th century in Sweden. The central question is: How can the lantern lectures shed light on the picture’s multimodal history of knowledge? In three case studies, the project investigates how the lantern lectures, in image and text, 1) were historically situated between the arts and the sciences, 2) mediated the popular subject of travels around the world together with the illustrated press and 3) mediated art history along with print reproductions of artworks.

Previous research

During 2020, I was enrolled in the Metadata Culture research group (http://metadataculture.se/).

My three-year postdoctoral project Graphic Illustration: Image and Text from the Point of View of Mechanical Reproduction (2016–19) studied what significance the new 19^th-century technologies of reproduction had for the illustration as pictorial genre. The project was based on historiographic studies of the modern (post 1800) concept of illustration and intermedial studies of 19^th-century illustrated literature in a broad sense, including both illustrated press and fiction.

In my doctoral dissertation, Konst i omlopp: Mening, medier och marknad i Stockholm under 1700-talets senare hälft (2014), I examined how 18^th-century concepts of art circulated and transformed on the cultural market of the time. This included three case studies about 1) concepts of art in papers and pamphlets in the light of 2) the new public art exhibitions and 3) the print market. The thesis constitutes a critique of the historiography of the birth and establishment of the autonomous concept of art.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Metareference in the Nineteenth-Century Pictorial Press and Beyond

  2023. Sonya Petersson. The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, 1-29

  Chapter

  Metareference is a medial and semiotic phenomenon that occurs whenever a media product directs attention to its own medial and representational qualities. Usually associated with postmodern art and culture, metareference operates in the margins of media history. This chapter therefore makes a point of examining its presence in the nineteenth-century pictorial press, represented by the Swedish journal Ny Illustrerad Tidning (1865–1900). Here, metareference appears in the form of pictorialized letters, pictures within pictures, and textual elements that are neither inscriptions nor part of the depiction, but are nonetheless integral to pictorial representation. In this capacity, the Swedish journal is like its European and North American counterparts, which were all part of a media culture where the illustrated press boomed. The chapter aims to study how metareference in this context builds on what is introduced as the picture’s inherent, both formal and historical, intermediality. Proceeding from the closely connected fields of intermedial studies, word and image studies, and media history, the chapter demonstrates how metareference is dependent on a web of intermedial relations that tie together media products, mediating practices, and media concepts in the broader nineteenth-century media culture and how metareferential explicitness and implicitness results from such meaning-making, historical as well as formal, intermedial relations. Ultimately, and beyond the media culture of the nineteenth century, the chapter’s metareferential examples are highlighted as tools to reexamine past and present historiographically established discourses on media, mediation, and representation.

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• Inledning

  2022. Sonya Petersson. Semiotik, 1-28

  Chapter

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• Semiotik: Teoretiska tillämpningar i konstvetenskap

  2022. .

  Book (ed)

  Antologin Teoretiska tillämpningar i konstvetenskap demonstrerar, presenterar och problematiserar tillämpningen av semiotisk teori på konstvetenskapliga studieobjekt. Den centrala ambitionen är att diskutera och exemplifiera de specifika frågor och problem som semiotikens möte med just konstvetenskapliga studieobjekt ger upphov till. Till dessa hör frågor om visuell kommunikation och visuella koder, materialitet och medialitet så som i andra sammanhang förbisedda aspekter av tecknet, samt tecknets och därmed tolkningens historicitet. Antologins sex kapitel inkluderar studier av samtida modefotografi och skulptur, pre- och postindustriella möbler, 1600- och 1800-talets oljemåleri och 1800-talets pressbild.

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• Tecknets medialitet

  2022. Sonya Petersson. Semiotik, 149-172

  Chapter

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• Digital Human Sciences: New Objects - New Approaches

  2021. .

  Book (ed)

  The ongoing digitization of culture and society and the ongoing production of new digital objects in culture and society require new ways of investigation, new theoretical avenues, and new multidisciplinary frameworks. In order to meet these requirements, this collection of eleven studies digs into questions concerning, for example: the epistemology of data produced and shared on social media platforms; the need of new legal concepts that regulate the increasing use of artificial intelligence in society; and the need of combinatory methods to research new media objects such as podcasts, web art, and online journals in relation to their historical, social, institutional, and political effects and contexts. The studies in this book introduce the new research field “digital human sciences,” which include the humanities, the social sciences, and law. From their different disciplinary outlooks, the authors share the aim of discussing and developing methods and approaches for investigating digital society, digital culture, and digital media objects.

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• Introduction: Digital Human Sciences as a Field of Research

  2021. Sonya Petersson, Uno Fors. Digital Human Sciences, 1-20

  Chapter

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• Seeing Images: Metadata and Mediation in the Digital Archive

  2021. Sonya Petersson, Anna Näslund Dahlgren. Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research 13 (2), 104-132

  Article

  In the cultural heritage digital archive, descriptive metadata makes images (re)searchable. Text-based searches seek terms that match metadata terms or terms referring to aspects of images that have previously been considered essential to select and describe in metadata terms. Such considerations are bound up with historically changing institutional agendas, ideas about user preferences, and implementation of metadata standards. This study approaches image accessibility from a different perspective. It aims to investigate how the infrastructure of the digital archive, comprising metadata and interface, intervenes with, circumscribes as well as enables, the images’ visibility and knowledge-producing capacity. The starting points are: first, that images in digital archives, exemplified by the online image collections in Alvin and DigitaltMuseum, are mediated, mediating, and “mixed” media objects that simultaneously represent the past and the present; second, that the digital archive in a media history of images functions as both a tool and an object of research. Using the platforms as tools of research, this study is based on test searches that aim to find viable search strategies for mixed media objects. The chosen search terms represent media-historically significant and common traits such as images that are combined with text and images that represent and/or mediate other images. The study discloses that the platforms give both false negatives and false positives. They do not support searches that focus media terms and relations between media elements. These problems are further related both to heterogenous metadata practices and to the simultaneously restricted and broad image concept behind them. As objects of research, both platforms are considered in relation to a future construction of a media history of images, where the digital archive is a particular node. The study demonstrates how the “hypermedial” environment associated with new media is prefigured by media interrelations in analog images – or images that are accessible as mediated through the archive’s interface and as policed by the archive’s metadata structure.

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• Reframing the Concept of Illustration: Image, Text, and the Double Difference of Reproductive Media

  2020. Sonya Petersson. Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 89 (4), 273-292

  Article

  In order to reframe the conventional bimedial (textual and pictorial) concept of illustration, this study examines illustrations and their textual and pictorial elements from the point of view of the medium of reproduction – which includes present-day digital photography as well as nineteenth-century xylography. The study investigates two nineteenth-century illustrated texts, the Swedish literary review Vår tid and the 1845 edition of Jacques Cazotte’s novel Le Diable amoureux. Both provide examples of how nineteenth-century xylography transmits the images it reproduces into new textual containers, be it illustrated journals or books. The argument made is that the concept of illustration, rather than denoting a bimedial object, is better understood as an ever-changing medial and semiotic function where the medium of reproduction enters between the image and text pairing in two particular ways. Firstly, by the way the traces after varying technologies of reproduction are manifested in the picture and take on semiotic functions in relation to textual and pictorial elements. Secondly, by the way the image, due to its medium of reproduction, is enabled to travel between different containers and thus to enter into new relationships with new textual elements. These two aspects constitute what I term the double difference of reproductive media. In developing this argument, the present study discusses multidirectional transfers of content between image and text, pictorial quotation as a type of metaphorical rather than a technological reproduction, and how the place assigned an ‘original’ is occupied by an anterior reproduction.

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• Introduction

  2018. Christer Johansson, Sonya Petersson. The Power of the In-Between, 1-21

  Chapter

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• The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection

  2018. .

  Book (ed)

  The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.

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• The counteractive illustration and its metalanguage

  2018. Sonya Petersson. Word and Image 34 (4), 349-362

  Article

  Illustration may be thought of as a picture relating to the text in a containing medium, such as a book. Here, however, the objective is to reconsider some of the conceptual conventions surrounding the pictorial genre, by way of using illustrations as productive of their own metalanguage or of a language that refers to illustration as a media phenomenon. Illustrations taken from the Swedish nineteenth-century magazine Ny Illustrerad Tidning are inserted into a framework of historiographic texts on the genre of illustration, by nineteenth-century writers such as Henry Blackburn and P. G. Hamerton, and present concepts about media and media interrelations, most notably W. J. T. Mitchell’s ‘imagetext’. Rather than test the illustrations’ capability of accommodating the juxtaposed texts and concepts, the study makes a case for their ability to counteract—negotiate, complicate, adjust, sidestep, or discard—the terms initially on offer. From a close analysis of the illustrations’ media properties, in relation to the conceptual material, the study solicits from the illustrations a metalanguage that defers the conventional separation of image and text, and displaces the idea of an original preceding the medium of reproduction. In conclusion, the study argues for two aspects that give cause to reconsider some conventional assumptions about the genre of illustration and move beyond the concept of ‘imagetext’: counteraction as providing a methodological strategy for knowledge production beyond the confines of the containing medium; and the mediality of illustration as a three-part relation between the image–text–media of reproduction rather than the two-part relation of the image–text.

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• Unfixing the Concept of Illustration: Its Historiographical Ambivalence and Analytical Potential

  2018. Sonya Petersson. The Power of the In-Between, 321-347

  Chapter

  Intermediality enters this study through the concept of illustration. The study’s twofold objective is to analyse the concept of illustration historiographically and operationally. The leading questions concern how the concept of illustration has been verbalized and negotiated in both textual and pictorial media, and how it can be further used as an analytical tool in studying illustrations. On the one hand, “illustration” is examined as a genre of pictures, whose characteristic trait is the combined mediality of textual and pictorial elements being both materially present in the same object. On the other hand, it is examined as a genre of pictures also bearing upon/being modelled by past and present meta concepts, such as “illustration.” The study makes two claims: one historiographical and one operational. The first is underbuilt by juxtaposing a concept of illustration derived from analysis of historiographic texts with a pictorial instance of the genre of illustration. Here, the outcome of analysis is to stress the historiographic concept of illustration as marked by the ambivalence of conflicting hierarchies and values. The second claim is conditioned by allowing the pictorial example to confront its meta concept. Here, the outcome of analysis is to demonstrate how the two functions of illustrated and illustrating are unfixed from their conventional ties to a textual source and pictorial target. Rather, the insight of study is that the functions of illustrated and illustrating are mutually reversible. The “same” object could through the serial course of an analysis occupy them both.

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• The Significance of the Graphic Mark: The New Medium of Nineteenth-Century Illustration in Conceptual and Pictorial Practice

  2017. Sonya Petersson. Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 86 (2), 97-115

  Article

  This article aims at exploring the significance of the graphic with regard to the genre of illustration as a new medium in later 19^th-century print culture, and thereby highlighting something that has often been treated as a transparent package of content: the graphic surface. The study accounts, on the one hand, for the graphic as a theme in 19^th century art theory and criticism, where it was recognized as a part of modernity and as the common denominator of print media widely conceived. On the other hand, it accounts for how graphic qualities in illustrations, such as the parallel strokes and cross-hatchings of the pictorial surface, functions as signs and partake in the meaning making process of illustrated literature, which has often been restricted to the analytical units of motif and story. In conclusion, the graphic logic that drives the study is demonstrated in the role of a media historical cut that questions the separation of ‘the graphic arts’ from print media in a broader sense and in the role of conducting an analysis of the graphicness of both text and picture where non-narrative signs are mediated into words, without evening out the differences between them.

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• Konst i omlopp: mening, medier och marknad i Stockholm under 1700-talets senare hälft

  2014. Sonya Petersson.

  Thesis (Doc)

  The aim of this doctoral thesis is to explore how art was mediated and given meaning in the environment of an urban media culture in Stockholm during the second part of the 18th century. It comprises studies of how art was distributed on the market, how it was discussed in the press and how it was exhibited in public. It also includes an analytical orientation toward mixing of concepts and values, rather than purifying them into categories such as elite and popular. Art is approached as an open concept of investigation.

  The thesis presents three studies. The first discusses art as concepts and subject matter in papers, pamphlets and encyclopaedias, with a critical stand against the historiography emphasizing the establishment of the 'fine arts'.  The second situates art in two parallel practises of showing art in public, exhibitions arranged by the Academy of Arts and the Auction Chamber's public sales. The third deals with prints on the market, a medium equally recognized as one of the fine arts and as a visual mass medium. All studies also consider notions of interaction, public, and social class.

  Two overarching arguments are developed. The first concerns media cultural functions as mechanisms of cultural transgression. This argument points to the mixing of international and local, regarding both themes in the press and prints on the market. It also stresses the mixing of art, commerce, and entertainment, in the dual character of both the academy's exhibitions and the auction's sales. The second argument consists in pointing to alternative cuts, by which I suggest discursive relations between art, luxury, entertainment, and knowledge. These are areas that, since the 18th century, have often been kept apart, but were nonetheless deeply interwoven. One overarchig pattern studied throughout the thesis is the 18th-century linking of the fine arts as well as luxury, entertainment, and knowledge to a perceptually defined subject.

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Show all publications by Sonya Petersson at Stockholm University