My research lies within the field of collective memory, history writing and history culture. How the past – or images of the past – is constructed and built, as well as rejected. What is considered important, and how do these values change over time?

In one example of an international, interdisciplinary project on negotiating the pasts, the participants discussed how the past has been made meaningful and relevant in later periods, as a process of developing consensus or causing conflicts with one’s contemporaries. The results are available in Negotiating Pasts in the Nordic Countries. Interdisciplinary Studies in History and Memory Memory (eds. Anne Eriksen & Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Nordic Academic Press, 2010).

Another example is the participation in the interdisciplinary reference volume on memory studies in Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia Handbook of Pre-Modern Nordic Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches (eds Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann & Stephen A Mitchell, De Gruyter, 2018).

I am also working with fictive kinship in the Old Norse sagas, and was rewarded a Visiting Fellowship from the British Academy to visit Professor R.I.M. Dunbar at the University of Liverpool. Professor Dunbar, now Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, was one of the project leaders of the British Academy Centenary Research Project: “Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain”. This interdisciplinary project is exploring how the early hominid brain evolved from its apelike beginnings 3-5 million years ago to the modern human. I analyse if kinship is related to an individual’s decision to use violence or not, by focussing on fictive kinship in the Icelandic sagas. Oxford University Press published Social Brain, Distributed Mind (eds. R.I.M Dunbar, C. Gamble and J. Gowlett) in 2010. The project continues to publish analyses, most recently in the article "Are there fitness benefits to violence? The case of medieval Iceland" i Evolution and Human Behavior, written by R.I.M. Dunbar & A. Wallette (2024).