Stefan Jonsson

Position

Professor

Areas of Research

Stefan Jonsson is Professor of Ethnic studies. His research is multidisciplinary with a base in critical cultural theory and aiming toward an understanding of the social and historical formation of collective identities.

He received his Ph.D. from the Program in Literature at Duke University, USA, in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000 he was a fellow in residence at Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and in 2006 Visiting associate Professor in German Studies at University of Michigan. He has also been associate professor of aesthetics and research leader in cultural theory at Södertörn University, Sweden.

Originally a scholar and critic of literature, aesthetics, and intellectual history, Stefan Jonsson has increasingly focused on the social and historical processes through which identities are constituted and transformed, identity being understood as a crossroads between the psychic and the political or the social. He has recently completed a project concerning the category and fantasy of 'the masses' and 'the people' in European culture. The first part of this project, 'A Brief History of the Masses: Three revolutions,' was published by Columbia University Press in 2008. A second part, 'Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses in Germany and Austria between the Wars', is forthcoming.

Together with professor Peo Hansen he is working on a project - 'Building Eurafrica: Reviving Colonialism through European Integration' - that explores the colonial origins of the process of European integration, and the ways in which this affects European citizenship as well as the policies of the present European Union toward the non-European world.

Jonsson has also written, in Swedish, a trilogy of books on racism, multiculturalism, identity politics, postcolonial culture, and globalization – 'The Others: American Culture Wars and European Racism', 1993; 'Other places: an Essay on Cultural identity', 1995; and 'The Center of the World: An Essay on Globalization', 2001 (all three collected and published in new edition in 2005) – that has received wide attention in Scandinavia, among scholars and intellectuals as well as the general public. His 'Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity' - a study of nationalism, imperialism, and subjectivity in the context of German-Austrian literature - was published in 2000 by Duke University Press, and together with visual artist Pia Arke he has written 'Stories from Scoresbysund', a book on Greenland, photography, colonization and mapping. 

Stefan Jonsson is also senior literary critic at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s major newspaper, and has contributed to international magazines and journals such as Lettre International, Interventions, Globalizations, New Left Review, boundary 2, New German Critique, Representations, Humboldt, and Art Forum.

Publications:

http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/searchlist.jsf?searchtype=postgraduate&freetext=jonsson,stefan