Stockholm university

Sune Bechmann Pedersen

About me

Docent (Reader) in History and Associate Professor of Digital History. Before joining Stockholm I worked as researcher at Media History, Lund University, and held postdocs at the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies, and at the Centre for European Research, University of Gothenburg. A historian of 20th century Europe, I specialise in the transnational history of media, memory, tourism, European integration, and the Cold War.

My current research focuses on the entanglement of transnational tourist experts, international organisations, and national bureaucracies between 1918 and the early 1960s, when tourism emerged as a site for imagining and constructing an integrated Europe.

I am the chair of the Digital History Seminar, co-editor of Tourism and Travel during the Cold War (Routledge 2019) and co-author of The History of the European Travel Commission 1948-2018 (ETC 2018). I have previously served as Reviews Editor of Journal of Tourism History (2018-2023).

I am a member of the Entangled Media Histories (EMHIS) network.

EDUCATION

PhD in History, Lund University, 2015
MA in History, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2009
BA in History, University of Copenhagen, 2006

Teaching

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

Research

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.

Publications

For publications and research activities prior to my employment at Stockholm University, see the Lund University Research Portal.

 

 

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • 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.

    Read more about Historical GIS and Guidebooks
  • 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.

    Read more about Expanding media histories
  • 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
    Read more about Midlife media history

Show all publications by Sune Bechmann Pedersen at Stockholm University