I currently teach these courses in Swedish

• History I: World History and Swedish History: Modern Times
• History II: Historical Research
• MA-level: Theory of Knowledge and Scientific Ethics in the Historical Science
• MA-level: Historical Methods
• PhD-level: Introduction to the Doctoral Programme in History

In the current project, Tourism Governance and the Making of Europe, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2023-25, and undertaken in collaboration with Igor Tchoukarine (University of Minnesota), we study the intertwining of tourism governance, mobility, and diplomacy. Our argument is that between 1918 and the early 1960s, tourism emerged as a site for imagining and constructing European integration. During this period, tourism transformed from a poorly understood, unregulated, and largely elite phenomenon to one that was academically and politically institutionalized, involved broad swathes of society, and was regulated at multiple levels of governance.

In my previous project, Holidays behind the Iron Curtain, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2018-20 and based at Lund University and University of Amsterdam, I studied the politics and practices of western tourism to Communist Europe, e.g. in diplomatic negotiations, holiday photography and guidebooks.

I completed my doctoral project, Reel Socialism, in 2015 at Lund University. In this project I studied cinema and memories of the communist past in Germany and the Czech Republic after 1989.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Tourism Diplomacy in Cold War Europe: Symbolic Gestures, Cultural Exchange and Human Rights

  2024. Sune Bechmann Pedersen, Elitza Stanoeva. Contemporary European History

  Article

  The post-war boom in international travel made tourism a question for international diplomacy. Focusingon the growth of bilateral tourism agreements during the Cold War, this article shows how the meaning oftourism was negotiated by and between governments on either side of the East–West divide. While previous research on tourism in the Cold War has focused on the threat tourist traffic posed to nationalsecurity in socialist states, the present study also considers the dilemmas it presented to liberal democracies. The article analyses the intersections of tourism with issues of foreign trade, cultural exchange andhuman contacts, which shaped the contestations over tourism throughout the Cold War.

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• Digital History and Immaterial Infrastructure: A Bottom-Up Approach

  2024. Sune Bechmann Pedersen, Marie Cronqvist, Kajsa Weber. Proceedings of the Huminfra Conference (HiC 2024), 20-25

  Conference

  This paper argues for an expanded view of research infrastructure. Drawing on our experiences leading the research platform DigitalHistory@Lund, it shows how research capacity can be unlocked “bottom-up”, by providing scholars with comparatively cheap—yet often inaccessible— technological support. By engaging researchers in digitally enabled scholarly practices, the platform yielded a multiplying effect that has seen participants produce highly competitive grant applications and eventually bring home external funding currently worth eight times the platform’s original costs. The platform thus demonstrates the importance of “immaterial” infrastructure in the sense of basic organisational structures that facilitate collaboration and communication.

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• Historical GIS and Guidebooks: A Scalable Reading of Czechoslovak Tourist Attractions

  2023. Sune Bechmann Pedersen, Mathias Johansson. Digital Humanities Quarterly 17 (2)

  Article

  This article demonstrates the value of “scalable reading” of historical travel guides, combining traditional close reading with computer-assisted distant reading. Aiming to scrutinize the persistence of older tourist attractions under communism, we analyse guidebooks intended for similar audiences but produced under different political regimes. More specifically, we compare three travel guides to the same geographical area produced between 1905 and 1959: one to communist cold war Czechoslovakia, one to democratic interwar Czechoslovakia, and one to the Habsburg-era Czech lands and Slovakia. We analyse the geographic distribution of attractions by geolocating the guidebook toponyms and visualizing them with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This distant reading is complemented with a hermeneutic analysis grounded in a close reading of the guidebook text. The combination of these approaches documents the similarities in the symbolic representation of the country’s attractions across political caesuras and provides a methodological template for future explorations of travel guides with historical GIS.

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• Midlife media history: Turen går til and tourist guidebooks in the era of mass travel

  2023. Sune Bechmann Pedersen, Henning Hansen. Expanding media histories, 197-220

  Chapter

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• Expanding media histories: Cultural and material perspectives

  2023. .

  Book (ed)

  Mediehistoria är ett snabbt växande fält som omfattar mer än studier av medieteknologier eller institutioner som press, radio och tv. I antologin visar författarna på styrkorna med att använda ett brett mediebegrepp och analyserar i boken allt från vardagsnära trycksaker till transnationella politiska fenomen med exempel tagna ur bl.a. spiritistiska seanser, gallupundersökningar och Ikeakataloger.

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Show all publications by Sune Bechmann Pedersen at Stockholm University