Adam Hjorthén
Senior lecturer/Associate Professor at Department of English, The Swedish Institute for North American Studies
- Email:
- adam.hjorthen[AT-sign]engelska.uu.se
- Telephone:
- +4618-471 1568
- Visiting address:
- Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3 L
- Postal address:
- Box 527
751 20 Uppsala
Short presentation
I am senior lecturer in American Studies at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS), a division of the Department of English, where I teach classes in North American history, U.S. politics, and race and ethnicity in the United States. My research focuses on cultural memory—including commemorations, monuments, museum exhibitions, public festivals, and the popular movement of genealogy—and Swedish-American relations in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I have a PhD in history from Stockholm University (2015), where I was a doctoral students in the Research School for Studies in Cultural History (FoKult). Before coming to SINAS, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, and the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University (through VR's international postdoc program, and as a postdoc in cultural history at SU). I have previously taught at the history departments at Stockholm and Uppsala, and been a visiting scholar at George Washington University and the University of Minnesota.
From 2012–2020, I was on the board of the Swedish Association for American Studies (SAAS), with the last four years serving as the SAAS President. Since 2021, I am the book review editor of Swedish-American Historical Quarterly.
I am the 2018 recipient of the Loubat Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquity, for my dissertation (awarded every 3-5 years for a publication in North American archaeology, history, ethnography, or numismatics), and the 2015 Orm Øverland Prize for best graduate student essay from the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS).
My research deals with Swedish-American relations in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular focus on cultural heritage and memory. My publications have explored the many ways in which histories of Swedish settlement and immigration in North America have been made meaningful and functional on both sides of the Atlantic. This includes studies of commemorations, monuments, museums, tourism, and the popular movement of genealogy. This research has for example resulted in my monograph Cross-Border Commemorations Celebrating Swedish Settlement in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018).
I have also worked extensively with developing the analytical and methodological study of Swedish-American relations. Together with Professor Dag Blanck I am co-founder and co-organizer of the research network “Swedish-American Borderlands,” funded by the Swedish Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (RJ). This international and interdisciplinary network—which gathers twenty-plus scholars from Europe and North America—is an attempt at reconceptualizing the broader field of Swedish-American relations. This work has resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies (7:1), and the edited volume Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming in June 2021).
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