Making Cultural History

Cultural history tends to elude positive definition. It deals in some sense with culture, and with history, combined in a creative and often critical analysis. But its strength and analytical potential is to be found in its slipperiness, in its critical attitude to authoritative categorisation, and its relentless movement towards new angles, new spaces beyond the evident and the canonical. This volume has sprung out of the Research School for Studies in Cultural History at the Faculty of Humanities of Stockholm University, a five-year interdisciplinary research programme focusing on interplays between past and present. The Research School has provided a productive space for border-crossing academic enterprises. And as a result, the seventeen essays of this volume display just as many innovative approaches to traditional academic subjects such as celebrity, literary genre, prehistoric remains, television, and historic monuments. All stem from unexpected combinations and sliding perspectives, focusing on obscure corners and gaps between the illuminated centres of traditional academic knowledge. From such sliding perspectives follows the realisation that all narratives, representations, and claims of culture and history are in some sense political. The seventeen essays in this volume demonstrate how a shifting kaleidoscope of the academic subjects makes new knowledge possible, and enables the formulation of new critical questions. Challenging, disturbing, inspirational, these essays all make cultural history.

Anna Källén is a research officer for the Faculty Research School of Studies in Cultural History at Stockholm University. She has a PhD in archaeology from Uppsala University and is a former curator at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, researcher at the National Historical Museum in Stockholm, and editor of the journal Current Swedish Archaeology.