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Anna Blennow

Professor

Department of Languages and Literatures
Telephone
+46 31-786 17 69
Mail
anna.blennow@sprak.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Anna Blennow

I have been employed as a lecturer and researcher in Latin at the Department of Languages and Literatures since 2014, and I also work as an essayist and writer on cultural matters. I teach Latin at first- and second-cycle levels, and also teach in other courses within and outside the Faculty. In 2011, I developed the course Latin Epigraphy (LAT202, 7.5 credits), the first of its kind in the Swedish higher education sector, and it has since been offered every two years in partnership with the Swedish Institute in Rome (and from 2022 also with Uppsala university).

Between 2020 and 2025, I am employed 50 percent within the Modes of Modification research programme, financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (RJ). In this research programme, I am studying the arrival of Latin in the Nordic region during the early Middle Ages, mainly based on the Latin inscriptions from that period. Together with runologist Alessandro Palumbo (University of Oslo), I have also studied inscriptions that use both runes and the Latin alphabet, and the bilingual epigraphic script culture in the Nordic area during the early Middle Ages. The project’s website can be found here: https://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/research/projects/modes-of-modification/index.html

In a recent pilot project, I have investigated the Swedish and Latin works of diplomat and author Schering Rosenhane (1609–1663), and how he probably is to be identified as the person behind poet pseudonym “Skogekär Bergbo” (“Forest-loving Mountain-dweller”) who published three poetry collections in the 17th century (Thet swenska språketz klagemål, Wenerid, och Fyratijo små wijsor).

Previous research projects

I defended my thesis at the University of Gothenburg in 2006 in medieval Latin epigraphy in Rome. From 2008 to 2013, I had a post as a research assistant at the University of Gothenburg. Within this project I worked on a scholarly edition of Sweden’s medieval Latin inscriptions from the 1100s until about 1250. The project was published in Historiska Museets skriftserie 2016.

During this period, I also led the international network INSCRIPTA for research on Latin inscriptions (financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation – RJ).

In 2013–2016, together with literary studies researcher Stefano Fogelberg Rota, I led an interdisciplinary, international collaborative project on the history of the guidebook focusing on the city of Rome and entitled Topos and Topography – Rome as the Guidebook City. The project was based at the Swedish Institute in Rome, and aimed to examine the origins and development of the guidebook and to identify how the functions and characteristics of the guidebook gene have evolved over time and influenced modern guidebooks. The project was published in the book Rome and the Guidebook Tradition, De Gruyter 2019. We also organised a guidebook exhibition at the Carolina Rediviva Library in Uppsala. Both the research publication and the catalogue of the guidebook exhibition are freely downloadable in digital form (see under Publications). In connection with the project, I also published a popular science book entitled Guide till det medeltida Rom (“Guide to Medieval Rome”), Appell förlag 2020.

I have also contributed to a history project about Gothenburg’s first professor in Latin, Vilhelm Lundström, and a study trip to Rome that he led in 1909, which eventually sparked the establishment of the Swedish Institute in Rome in the 1920s. In a project funded by the Anna Ahrenberg Foundation, I studied the Gothenburg patron of the arts Anna Ahrenberg and her role in cultural and scholarly exchange between Gothenburg and Rome in the first half of the 1900s – activities pursued by Ahrenberg with Vilhelm Lundström for many years.