University of Gothenburg
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Mats Björkin

Head of department

Department. of Cultural
Sciences
Telephone
+46 31-786 53 33
+46 766-18 53 33
Mail
mats.bjorkin@filmvet.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Room number
2248
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

SENIOR LECTURER

Department. of Cultural
Sciences
Mail
mats.bjorkin@filmvet.gu.se

About Mats Björkin

Ph.D., Associate Professor in Film Studies

General

I finished my Ph.D. in Film Studies in 1998 (Stockholm University) and am since 2002 Senior Lecturer in Film Studies.

In addition to research and teaching in Film Studies, and for two years even at the School of Film Directing, I have also held several managerial, board positions and contributed to development projects. I have over the years also written about media and cultural theory in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

I am a member of the Game Research Colloquium.

Since July 2015 I am head of the Department of Cultural Sciences.

Research

My research is mainly about the history of video games, seen both as cultural and media history, but also as part of the histories of software and hardware.

I have also studied what media technologies, nature and human beings have to do with each other. Much has revolved around Sweden during the 1950s, where everything important could be communicated by means of film, television, audio tapes, films, flannelgraphs, exhibitions, advertising, magazines, catalogues, conferences, reports, and debates, but also with the help from trucks, blocks of ice, rivers, power plants, washing machines, hands and faces.

What unites these lines of research is that each object requires its own historical and theoretical analysis for it to say something on a more general level.

Teaching

I have taught in most areas of Film Studies and prefer combining overviews with problem-oriented case studies based on an idea that humanist education is primarily about helping students develop analytical skills to be able to do and make new exciting things. An example of this is the Bachelor's program Media, aesthetics and Cultural Entrepreneurship, which I took the initiative to in 2013 and then started the Autumn semester 2015.