Research group Forum Modernism

Forum Modernism at Stockholm University is an association for researchers whose work in some way concerns modernism, both through studies of its various mainstream and marginalized expressions, and through critical examinations of the concept as such.
Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses

Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses, Wikimedia Commons.


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.




There are no research project connections.

Department of Culture and Aesthetics

Becoming Leonor Fini

Andrea Kollnitz, Professor of Art History, has written a monograph on the surrealist artist Leonor Fini and her self-representations.

Department of Romance Studies and Classics

Alice Duhan, Romklass, awarded Swedish Research Council grant

Alice Duhan, currently postdoctoral research fellow at Romklass, has been awarded research funding from the Swedish Research Council in the annual call for humanities and social sciences. Her three-year project, "Translingual Writing post-1945 and the Multilingual Spaces of French Fiction", examines literary texts written by second language authors in French and asks how this literature can contribute to a re-reading of recent French literary history from the vantage point of multilingualism. Authors who write and publish literary texts in their second, third or fourth chronologically acquired language have always existed. It is indeed perhaps surprising that it is only in the last twenty years that a specialized research field has emerged that studies this “translingual” literature as a specific sub-category within literary studies. This project focuses on translingual fiction in French from 1945 onwards, a period when translingual writers not only came to play a particularly prominent role within French-language literature, but also increasingly came to be viewed – and often to perceive themselves – as belonging to a specific “translingual” literary tradition. The study aims to establish for the first time an overview and periodization of translingual writing in French from the mid-twentieth century to today, and will also contribute to our understanding of how translingual writing has been theorised and received in a specifically French-language context.

No events available.

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