Based on our online PhD colloquium on fascism and far-right studies, NORFAS and SWEFAS, in collaboration with the Department of History at Uppsala University, will host a Nordic Doctoral Symposium on Fascism Studies. The symposium will take place in autumn 2025 in Uppsala, organised by…
On June 16–17, 2025, NORFAS will together with the Department of History at Uppsala University arrange the international conference Flight, Adaptation and Resilience: Fascists, Collaborators and War Criminals in the Post-War Nordic Periphery. The early post-war history after the defeat of fascism remains understudied by…
On 21–22 August 2024, we will launch the special issue “The Print Culture of Conspiracist Antisemitism 1917–1945: Universal Patterns and Nordic Particularities” at the Oslo Jewish Museum. Edited by Nicola Karcher and Kjetil Braut Simonsen and based on a cooperation between NORFAS, the Oslo Jewish…
We are glad to announce that NORFAS, as part of a multi-disciplinary consortium, has received funding to establish a network and a hub, SWEFAS, for fascism studies at the Uppsala University. The funding source is CIRCUS, the Centre for Integrated Research on Culture and Society….
The Network for Nordic Fascism Studies published the peer-reviewed joint volume Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History in the series Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right. Our book outlines the evolution of transnational cooperation between the far right across the Nordic region,…
The Network for Nordic Fascism Studies (NORFAS) was established in early 2018 by researchers from Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. NORFAS consists of senior scholars, doing transnational and entangled research on the history of fascism and the far right in the Nordic countries. The aim is to allow researchers to collect, organise, compare, and together analyse the accumulating source material. To facilitate research cooperation across national borders, NORFAS organises regular meetings, workshops, joint conference participation, and joint publications by its members. Members are expected to actively participate in network activities.
NORFAS is led and coordinated by a steering committee, headed by Nicola Karcher (Norway) and Oula Silvennoinen (Finland), with Lars M. Andersson (Sweden), Sofie Lene Bak and Claus Bundgård Christensen (Denmark) as steering committee members. New members to the network are invited by joint agreement of the steering committee and must have produced comprehensive research in the field of Nordic fascism studies.
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Head of NORFAS Steering Committee
Research Fellow Oula Silvennoinen
Member of NORFAS Steering Committee
Senior Lecturer Lars M. Andersson
Member of NORFAS Steering Committee
Associate Professor Sofie Lene Bak
Head of NORFAS Steering Committee
Associate Professor Nicola Karcher
Associate Professor Heléne Lööw
Member of NORFAS Steering Committee
Associate Professor Claus Bundgård Christensen
Director, Centre for European Studies Leena Malkki
Professor Mattias Gardell
Research Professor Terje Emberland
Postdoctoral Fellow Celestine S. Kunkeler
Website editor
Postdoctoral Researcher Charlie Krautwald
Researcher Gustaf Forsell
Associate Professor Lena Berggren
Researcher Tommi Kotonen
Research fellow Tomas Poletti Lundström
Associate Professor Markus Lundström
Associate Professor Johan Stenfeldt
Associate Professor Victor Lundberg
Head of NORFAS Steering Committee
Research Fellow Oula Silvennoinen
Oula Silvennoinen is a Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland, University of Helsinki and affiliated researcher at the History Department at Uppsala University. 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. Read more…
Lars M. Andersson is Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Uppsala University. Andersson has mainly studied 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 as well three Festschrifts. He has been editor in chief of Historisk tidskrift (Stockholm), Read more…
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. Read more…
Nicola Karcher is a historian and Associate Professor in Social Science at the Østfold University College, Norway and affiliate researcher at the History Department at Uppsala University. At her faculty, she leads the research group PRIS (Politics, Religion, Ideology and Society in Education) and is a member of the Research Steering Committee. From 2020 to 2022, she was a steering board member of the National Network of Social Science in Education, Norway. Read more…
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) Read more…
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.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. 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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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. Their PhD thesis was on myth-making practices and respectability in Swedish and Dutch fascism in the 1930s, published in 2021 as a monograph, Making Fascism in Sweden and the Netherlands: Myth-Creation and Respectability, 1931–40. Read more…
Charlie Krautwald is a postdoctoral researcher in modern political and cultural history at the Saxo Institute, at the University of Copenhagen. He is currently employed on two research projects, Street-fighting Women. Gender, body, and violence on the Far Right in Interwar Scandinavia, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (2024-2026), and Code and Conspiracy. Antisemitism in Denmark After 1945 (2024-2028). Krautwald has contributed to the development of a Nordic research field on Interwar Period (1919-1939) political culture, Read more…
Gustaf Forsell is a researcher 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 wrote his doctoral dissertation on Christian national socialism in Sweden from 1925 to 1945, which is 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…
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).
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. Read more…
Tomas Poletti Lundström, Ph.D. in the History of Religions, is a research fellow at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. He is an expert on the religion-politics nexus regarding generic fascism and Christian nationalism. Poletti Lundström studies antisemitism within the Swedish Pentecostal movement – as part of The Free Church and the Holocaust, a three-year project funded by the Swedish Research Council. He is finishing a book entitled Spiritual Vikings: A Religious History of Radical NationalismRead more…
Markus Lundström holds a PhD in Economic History and is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Mid Sweden University and affiliate researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR) at Uppsala University. He has published extensively in the field of historical sociology. His fascism research focuses on how radical-nationalist ideas travel and transfigure through time and include the theoretical article “Radical Nationalism” (Journal of Political Ideologies, 2023) and the empirical article “Radical-Nationalist Podcasting under a Post-Fascist Condition” (Fascism, 2021).Read more…
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),Read more…
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. Read more…
