Head of NORFAS Steering Committee

Research Fellow Oula Silvennoinen

Oula Silvennoinen is a Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland, University of Helsinki. His research interests include the history of policing and police institutions, the Holocaust, fascism, and the Waffen-SS in Finland, as well as the post-war politics of memory, on which he has published in Finnish, Swedish, German, English, Estonian, Ukrainian and Romanian. Silvennoinen has consistently received highly competitive research funding and has completed four externally funded research projects alongside several academic book projects. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Jerusalem, and the Helmut Schmidt University of the Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg. Read more…

Member of NORFAS Steering Committee

Senior Lecturer Lars M Andersson

Lars M Andersson is Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Uppsala University. Andersson has mainly done research on Swedish antisemitism and refugee policy, but has also published high school textbooks on history and religious studies, anthologies on contemporary history, counterfactual history, the image as a historical source, liability issues and moral debate in historical accounts on national socialism, migration, and Jewish history. He has previously been editor of Historisk tidskrift (Stockholm) and co-editor of the Lagerbringbiblioteket series, is an editorial board member of Historisk tidskrift, Nordisk Judaistik/ Scandinavian Jewish Studies and Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia, co-editor of the new Forum for Jewish Studies series, Uppsala Jewish Studies, and will from May 2022 serve as editor of Personhistorisk tidskrift. Read more…

Member of NORFAS Steering Committee

Associate Professor Sofie Lene Bak

Sofie Lene Bak is Associate Professor in Modern History at Copenhagen University. Her fields of expertise include the Holocaust, antisemitism, and racism studies, and she has written intensively on Danish national socialist movements. Bak received her PhD from Copenhagen University in 2003 with a dissertation on antisemitism in Denmark during 1930–1945 and published ground-breaking monographs on the Holocaust in Denmark, repatriation and restitution of Holocaust victims, and most recently on the legal fight against antisemitism and Nazism. She is former curator and Research Manager at the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen and by virtue of her theoretical and methodological interests in oral history and memory studies continuously dedicated to public history in developing TV documentaries, educational textbooks, and features. Read more…

Head of NORFAS Steering Committee

Associate Professor Nicola Karcher

Nicola Karcher is a historian and Associate Professor in Social Science at the Østfold University College, Norway, where she leads the research group PRIS (Politics, Religion, Ideology and Society in Education) and is a member of the Research Steering Committee at her faculty. She is also a steering board member of the National Network of Social Science in Education, Norway. She has been a researcher in the project Democratic institutions facing Nazi occupation: Norway in a comparative perspective from 2013 to 2017, at the Norwegian Holocaust Center and financed by the Norwegian Research Council. Her teaching expertise is directed towards Holocaust education, democratic citizenship, and prevention of extremism and racism in school and teacher education. Read more…

Associate Professor Heléne Lööw

Heléne Lööw is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Uppsala University. Her dissertation from 1990 on the Swedish national socialist movements is still the standard work in this field. Lööw has held positions as researcher at the universities of Gothenburg and Stockholm, and in the Swedish National Research Council for Crime Prevention (BRÅ). From 2000 to 2001, she worked at the Prime Minister’s office in the “Stockholm International Forum: combating intolerance”, resulting in the establishment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the government agency Living History Forum, the latter of which she was director from 2003 to 2006. She took part in establishing the Centre for Police Research (CPR) at Uppsala University, which she headed from 2010 to 2013. Read more…

Member of NORFAS Steering Committee

Associate Professor Claus Bundgård Christensen

Claus Bundgård Christensen is Associate Professor of History at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has published a number of scholarly books and articles in Danish, English, French and German on the First and Second World War, the Holocaust, national socialism, the war of extermination on the Eastern Front, and the far right and radicalism for publishers such as Oxford University Press, Palgrave, Routledge, Bloomsbury, Verlag Ferdinand Schöning and Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. He is the author and co-author of a number of critically acclaimed books including Under hagekors og Dannebrog. Danskere i Waffen SS 1940–45(Aschehoug, 1998), Danskere på vestfronten 1914–1918 (Gyldendal, 2009),Danmark besat – krig og hverdag 1940–45, Waffen-SS – Europas nazistiske soldater (Gyldendal, 2015),and Fra verdenskrig til borgerkrig. Østfronten 1914–1924 (Gyldendal, 2009). Read more..

Director, Centre for European Studies Leena Malkki

Leena Malkki is a historian and political scientist specialising in the study of political violence in Western countries. She currently works as the Director of the Centre for European Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Malkki has been a visiting researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. She is editor-in-chief of Politiikasta, an award-winning Finnish-language journal that aims to popularise social science research for a larger audience, the chair of the ECPR Standing Group on political violence and a former chairperson of the Finnish International Studies Association from 2014 to 2017. Her research interests include the transnational dynamics of political violence, the decline of violent campaigns, school shootings and mapping societal processes that provide resilience against political violence. Malkki is currently leading an externally funded research project that aims to understand why there has been so little political violence in post-war Finland and has recently completed four externally funded research projects, two of which focus on extraparliamentary fascist and anti-immigration activism in present-day Finland. She has edited several special issues on political violence for international peer-reviewed journals, for example, on terrorism and political violence in the Nordic countries, and on lone-actor violence. Read more…

Professor Mattias Gardell

Mattias Gardell is Nathan Söderblom Professor in Comparative Religion, and researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. He is an award-winning international expert in the field of religion, politics, racism, and violence, and a leading scholar in areas such as fascism, black and white radical nationalism, white power culture, Islamophobia, political Islam, torture history, esoteric fascism, white nostalgia and the politics of memory, hate crime, and political violence. Gardell holds substantial experience in directing large research groups and building cross-disciplinary research environments. He was Director of Research at CEMFOR from 2017 to 2021, and served as Team leader and Steering Board member of the IMPACT of Religion: Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy, Linnaeus Centre of Excellence at Uppsala University. Read more…

Research Professor Terje Emberland

Terje Emberland is Research Professor at the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies (HL-senteret) and affiliated researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. Emberland is one of the foremost experts on the history of Norwegian fascism, antisemitism, occupation history, and conspiracy theories. He has written a number of articles and monographs in these fields and co-edited several anthologies. He has been Senior Researcher in the government-funded research project Norwegians in the Waffen-SS from 2006 to 2012, and in the research project Democratic Institutions facing Nazi occupation: Norway in a comparative perspective from 2013 to 2016, financed by the Norwegian Research Council. Read more…

Postdoctoral Fellow Celestine S. Kunkeler

Celestine S. Kunkeler is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX), at the University of Oslo. Their current research project concerns violent transnational far-right networks in the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, and the particular role of military and paramilitary volunteers in interwar north-western Europe. Read more…

Website editor

Lecturer Charlie Krautwald

Charlie Krautwald is a researcher of modern political, cultural, and urban history and presently employed as a part-time lecturer in History at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has contributed to the development of a Nordic research field on Interwar Period (1919-1939) political culture, contentious politics, and activism with ground-breaking work on the dynamics of militant anti-fascist and far-right activism. The key findings of his thesis (2021) were the documentation of the integral role posed by different conceptions of public urban space in 1930’s political culture and the uncovering of the interplay between street politics and the parliamentarian ambitions of e.g., far-right youth movements. Read more…

Researcher Gustaf Forsell

Gustaf Forsell is a PhD candidate in Church History at the Department of Theology and at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University, Sweden, with an expertise in Swedish fascism and historical and contemporary intersections between religion and fascism. Forsell is currently finalising his doctoral dissertation on Christian national socialism in Sweden from 1925 to 1945, which will be the first in-depth study on how Swedish national socialist ideas of Christianity contributed to their aspired political project in the interwar and wartime periods. Read more…

Associate Professor Lena Berggren

Lena Berggren is associate professor of history at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at the University of Umeå, Sweden. Berggrens research have been focussed mainly on Swedish antisemitism, ultra-nationalism and intellectual fascism, with a major research project, Swedish Fascism 1920-1950, financed by the Swedish Research Council (2003-2005).

Researcher Tommi Kotonen

Tommi Kotonen is a political scientist and researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Between 2018 and 2021 he worked as a research coordinator of the Academy of Finland profiling area Crises Redefined: Historical Continuity and Societal Change. Kotonen is one of the leading experts on radical nationalist movements in Finland, widely used by the media, and has also worked as a consultant and country expert in several government and NGO projects both in Finland and abroad, including preventive policing units and the Finnish Ministry of the Interior as well as the German Foreign Office. His publications include works on the history of radical nationalist movements, far-right subculture, political violence, and vigilantism. Read more…

Associate Professor Johan Stenfeldt

Johan Stenfeldt is Associate Professor of History at Lund University, Sweden. In his research, he has devoted himself to political idea analysis and questions about how historical experiences are made usable in the ideological debate. Alongside political idea analysis, Stenfeldt has extensive experience in historical actor studies, ideological transition processes and social network analysis. These themes are touched on and developed in different ways in his three monographs Dystopiernas seger. Totalitarism som orienteringspunkt i efterkrigstidens svenska idédebatt (Agerings, 2013), Renegater. Nils Flyg och Sven Olov Lindholm i gränslandet mellan kommunism och nazism (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2019), and En global ideologihistoria. Read more…

Associate Professor Markus Lundström

Markus Lundström holds a PhD in Economic History and is an Associate Professor in Sociology and affiliate researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University, Sweden. His historical-sociological publication record includes two research monographs and twenty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His fascism research focuses on how radical-nationalist ideas travel and transfigure through time. He recently published a co-authored article entitled “Radical-Nationalist Podcasting under a Post-Fascist Condition” that employs the original method of podcast ethnography to explore how fascist temporalities are deployed by Swedish radical nationalists today (Fascism, 2021). Besides fascism studies, Lundström’s research also concerns the political histories and historiographies of social movements, with a particular focus on anarchism. Read more…

PhD Candidate Daniel Sallamaa

Daniel Sallamaa is a PhD candidate of political history with expertise in the study of terrorism, political violence, and extremist movements. He holds an M.Soc.Sci. in political history with excellent grades from the University of Helsinki and an MA with first-class honours in international relations and history from the University of St. Andrews. Sallamaa is currently finalising his doctoral dissertation on the action repertoires and use of violence of extraparliamentary fascist groups in 21^st century Finland, which will bring considerable new knowledge into the field. Read more…

Associate Professor Victor Lundberg

Victor Lundberg is Associate Professor in History and Senior Lecturer at the department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University. His research deals with cultural and ideological aspects of fascism and the far right during the twentieth century from various transnational perspectives, focusing on the historical transformations of fascist ideas and ideologies as well as the (re-)constructions and staging of fascist masculinities. From 2012 to 2017, he was a partaker in the trans-European research network behind the anthology New Political Ideas in the Aftermath of the Great War (2017). Read more…