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Mats Malm

Professor

Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion
Mail
mats.malm@lir.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
412 55 Göteborg
Room number
H411
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Mats Malm

PhD in 1996, visiting professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main 1998-99, professor at the University of Gothenburg since 2004. Professor II at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Langauges, University of Oslo, 2015-2018. Chair of The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) division for infrastructure 2015–2018. Head of the Swedish Literature Bank.

From June 2019 I am off duty, serving as permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, but you can still reach me on this e-mail address.  

My PhD thesis (1996) examined the theoretical aspects of the reception of Old Norse poetry in Scandinavian Gothicism. I have since published books on the early novel in Sweden, Swedish Baroque poetry, the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics and the issue of the voices of poetry: how they are experienced differently in different ages and thus how literature changes its meaning through medial transmission.

In articles, I have studied among other things the poetics of Antiquity, and Old Norse poetry and poetics. I was the editor of the journal of comparative literature, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, from 1997 to 1998 and have published a number of anthologies. I have been the editor of some scholarly editions, and – in connection with my work with the Swedish Literature Bank – developed the issues of textual criticism and the use of digitised literature. Recently, I have most engaged in Digital Humanities and the development of scholarly methods and approaches to text data bases. To that end, I started the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Gothenburg and Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries. 2015–2018 I lead the project Staging the Artist from the Archives: Ivar Arosenius, which includes merging archives into a kind of digital museum: The Arosenius Archive.

A side interest is translation. I have translated Icelandic sagas and Snorra Edda (with Karl G. Johansson), as well as some Latin texts. Issues of translation and how literary works change in translation as well as transmission are recurrent themes in my research.

I am a member of the board of the Swedish Society for Belles Lettres, “Michaelisgillet”, The Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg, The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, and The Swedish Academy. Cluster leader at the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg.