ORCID-id 0000-0003-4281-7257

Since 2013, I am a professor of museology with a focus on art at Lund University, from 2018 at the Faculty of Humanities. My research is focused on European visual arts and visual culture in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. I have dedicated particular attention to portraits, early photographs, the emergence of art museums, royal collections, early private collections, reception history, and reproduction and dissemination of art.

After studying at the universities in Stockholm, Uppsala and Linköping, I passed a dissertation on the introduction of portrait photography in the established market for portraits 1840-1865. The dissertation was based on studies I conducted in the Nordic countries, but focused on Swedish material.

My research has been conducted in close contact with the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Swedish National Gallery of Art, where I worked during the years 1988-96 and the autumn of 2000 as a curator and head at the departments of Royal Castles’ Collections and Loans, Archives and Pedagogy. In 1996-2000, I was an assistant professor at the Department of Art History at Uppsala University, and was appointed Professor of Art History (chair) from January 1, 2001. After two years as a professor, I transferred to the post as Director General of the Nationalmuseum, an appointment that lasted nine years and expired at year-end 2011/12. During this period, I was also involved in the construction of the Nationalmuseum’s research department and in collaboration with the art history departments of the universities in Stockholm and Uppsala.

The long-term interaction between research within the academy and work in art museums has resulted in publications focusing on collections and exhibitions. I was the editor of Kongl. Museum – rum för ideal och bildning/Kongl. Museum – (A) Place for Ideals and Education (Sthlm 1993) and Gips - tradition i konstens form/Plaster Casts (Sthlm 1999) and on the editorial board of Wahlverwandtschaft - Skandinavien und Deutschland 1800-1914 (Stockholm - Oslo - Berlin 1997-98). I have also contributed to Grasping the World: The Idea of ​​the Museum (Aldershot 2004) and The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18th and Early 19th Century Europe (Getty Publications 2012) as well as a large number of exhibition and catalogue projects. From 2003 to 2012, this work mainly focused on the scholarly design and layout of major international research-based exhibition projects in collaboration with art museums in Europe and the United States, in some cases with contributions to exhibition catalogues, such as Staging Power: Napoleon, Karl Johan, Alexander (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm - Château de Compiègne 2010), Lust & Last/Lust & Vice (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2011) and Pride & Prejudice (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2012, in collaboration with National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.).