Research group Forum Modernism

The objective is to be an interdisciplinary network for dialogue, ideas, events, and publications, while also highlighting the strong position of modernist research at Stockholm University.

Traditionally, modernism has been described as an aesthetic reaction against the social, scientific, religious, psychological, political, and economic changes of modernity. The term has been used to refer to works and practices that respond to what is perceived as a world and a time marked by disintegration and rootlessness. Historically, research typically sought to understand modernism as a specific period that culminated during the first decades of the 20th century. However, as a result of interrogations of Eurocentric perceptions of modernity, thinking of modernism as a phenomenon exclusively related to the social developments of Western Europe has become increasingly untenable.

Today, the spectrum of meanings carried by the term is both wider and vaguer, and it is continually adapted to global and transnational contexts as well as to inter-aesthetic renegotiations of the identities of different artforms. ‘Modernism’ no longer refers restrictively to the specifically Western highbrow culture that was for a long time considered its fundament, and the development of the term would seem to correspond to the internal premises of modernism, which are characterized by an exploration of the multiple, unstable, and precarious limits of the human and of art.

As the dynamic field of modernist studies expands, it becomes increasingly difficult to overlook and evaluate. In response, Forum Modernism assembles scholars from a broad range of disciplines and specializations in order to exchange knowledge and ideas and to keep each other up to date with developments within research on modernism.