Isabelle Karlsson is a Ph.D. candidate in the field of public diplomacy at the Department of Strategic Communication. Her research focuses on public diplomacy, discourse analysis and foreign policy.

Ongoing research projects

Isabelle Karlsson’s research mainly concerns Sweden’s public diplomacy and performance of foreign policy discourse in the international arena. In her dissertation project, she studies how public diplomacy as a communicative practice makes meaning of foreign policy. The focus lies on the processes in which narratives and discourses of ideological issues in Sweden’s feminist foreign policy are constructed. 

Publications

Isabelle has published in Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, in the Journal of Public Diplomacy, and in Media and Comumunication. Among others, she has presented her research as part of the panel “Performing Gender in Public Diplomacy Discourses” at the International Communication Association (ICA) Conference in 2021; as part of the panel “Emerging Scholars and New Research Directions in Public Diplomacy" at the 2022 ICA Post-Conference; as part of the panels "Public Diplomacy and Diplomatic Language" and "Feminist Foreign Policies: New Interventions" at the European International Studies Association (EISA) Conference in 2023; at the Doctoral Colloquium at the International Place Branding Association (IPBA) Conference in 2023; and as part of the roundtable "Reputational Security and Relationality: Beyond Soft Power" at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in 2024. She also presented her research at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy during her research visit in 2023.

Background

Isabelle has been a Ph.D. student at the Department of Strategic Communication at Lund University since 2019. She holds a Master's degree (M.Sc.) in Strategic Communication from Lund University and a Bachelor's degree (B.A.) in Communication Science and Sociology from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, which included one semester at the University La Sapienza in Rome.

She has practical experience from various organizations and sectors. Among others, she worked with journalism, corporate communications and brand management in several countries. You can find out more about her here.

Miscellaneous

Isabelle is the 2021/22 recipient of the Center on Public Diplomacy (CPD) Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the University of Southern California. 

For her Master thesis, in which she studied translationof feminism in Sweden’s nation branding, Isabelle earned The Gullers Grupp Award.

Isabelle is the coordinator of the Lund University research group in public diplomacy at the Department. She teaches on financial communication, communication theory, and Sweden's foreign policy, and supervises students in their mid-studies-thesis (“b-uppsats”) on research methods and academic writing.

She has German and Swedish as mother tongues and also speaks Italian fluently.