I am an Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Communication. After obtaining my PhD in 2018, I received the Swedish Research Council’s international postdoc grant with the research project Televising Information: Audiovisual Communication of Swedish Government Agencies (2020–2023). As part of the project, I spent one year at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University and one year at the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen as a postdoc.

My research profile is interdisciplinary. My three main areas of research are propaganda, preparedness culture and strategic communication, digital methods and visual communication. Currently, I am part of the sonic crisis communication project Soundscapes of Warning (2024–2026, funded by Vetenskapsrådet with Marie Cronqvist as PI). Working with an interdisciplinary research group comprising of scholars from history, ethnography and media and communication studies, the aim of this project is to trace the intellectual, political, material and cultural development of sonic public warnings. Within this project, I will lead SP2: Information, which studies the unique role that public service broadcasting and Sveriges Radio has played for Swedish preparedness, security and crisis communication over time, placing particular emphasis on the notion that communication infrastructures require continuous work – maintenance – to uphold efficiency. Related to this, I am part of the steering group of the interdisciplinary research environment Communication, Defence Willingness, and Democratic Resilience (CDR) at Lund University, which explores how how strategic communication contributes to mobilising citizens to defend the principles of liberal democracy. Together with Fredrik Mohammadi Norén, I am heading the research project The State Advertises, which is conducted in collaboration with Lund University Library (funded by the Ridderstad Foundation and Birgit and Sven Håkan Ohlssons Foundation). The project sets out to digitize a large corpus of posters commissioned by government agencies from the 1920s until today.

Today, the debates on “misinformation”, “disinformation” and “fake news” have reinvigorated interest in what was previously labeled as propaganda and public relations. What does the history of propaganda tell us about the swiftly shifting contemporary conceptual debates? This is a central question in my research, and in my view, there is an urgent need to critically historicize the potentially conflicting values, goals, and outcomes of propaganda and persuasion. Prior to joining the Department of Communication at Lund University, I wrote my dissertation on newsreels and documentaries as propaganda media during World War II, and together with Mohammadi Norén, I co-edited the Swedish language collection Efterkrigstidens samhällskontakter (2019) on propaganda, public relations and information practices in post-war Sweden. The book Nordic Media Histories of Propaganda and Persuasion (2022), which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Journalism, Media and Communication series in 2022, was edited together with Mohammadi Norén and C. Claire Thomson from University College London. This edited volume shines new light on the history of propaganda and persuasion during the Nordic welfare epoch. A common analytical framework is developed that highlights transnational and transmedial perspectives rather than national or monomedial histories. The return of propaganda in contemporary debate underlines the need to historically contextualize the role and function of persuasive communication activities in the Nordic region and beyond. Most recently, I co-edited the volume Media Tactics in the Long Twentieth Century (2024) together with Marie Cronqvist (Linköping University) and Mohammadi Norén. The book provides a media historical corrective to contemporary debates about strategic communication, reminding us of its long historical roots and many historical precedents, from propaganda and covert influence operations to public diplomacy.

Secondly, I am interested in using and developing digital methods in media scholarship. In the wake of mass digitization in the past decade, media scholars today are confronted with the challenge of dealing with abundance rather than scarcity – of cultural works, archival sources, and born-digital data. Within the digital humanities, this increase in scale presents an opportunity to engage with these materials using digital methods. Digital methods appeal to me particularly because it relies on a collaborative approach, reaching across traditional disciplinary boundaries and providing a new way of presenting and understanding media and communication history. Between 2020–2023, I worked on the media historical digital humanities project Televising Information. The focal point of this mixed methods project, which was conducted in collaboration with KBLab, was Sveriges Television’s bulletin program Anslagstavlan, which has been a unique audiovisual communication tool for Swedish government agencies since 1972. Currently, I am part of a multidisciplinary project called Modern Times 1936 (2022–2025, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond with Pelle Snickars as PI). Within this project, digital methods will be utilized to study expressions of modernity in a range of sonic and visual datasets from 1936, among them photographs from DigitaltMuseum, all surviving radio programs from Swedish Radio and all weekly newsreels and short films produced by Svensk Filmindustri. Here, an important ambition is to learn more about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in the exploration of the past.

A third key strand in my research profile could be described as visual communication. Besides my international postdoc project and the ongoing project The State Advertises, I have made international scholarly contributions studying television, documentary film, and memes as a form of political discourse.

I am currently a board member of the Swedish Association for Media and Communication Studies (FSMK) and the Nordic Media History Network (NOMEH). I am also a member of the Entangled Media Histories network (EMHIS).