University of Gothenburg
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Anton Jansson

Senior Lecturer

Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and
Religion
Mail
anton.jansson@lir.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Anton Jansson

I am a researcher and docent (associate professor) in History of Ideas and Science. At the moment, I am working on a research project on the history of atheism in Sweden: “Visions of a Society without God: The History of Atheism in Sweden 1879-1968”, financed by the Swedish Research Council. This project has been preceded by a few pilot studies on the same topic, for instance on the local history of atheism in Gothenburg.

I defended my PhD thesis in History of Ideas and Science in 2017. My dissertation, titled Revolution and Revelation: Theology in the Political Thought of Friedrich Julius Stahl, Wilhelm Weitling and Karl Theodor Welcker, dealt with the intersection of political thought and theology during the German Vormärz period, the decades before 1848. From a reading of the works of three central thinkers, I show how deeply entangled Christian theology was with the modern political ideologies in their formative period during this time.

After defending my thesis, I taught History of Ideas and Science in Gothenburg and performed a couple of smaller research projects, funded primarily by the Anna Ahrenberg foundation and the Johan & Jakob Söderberg foundation. During 2019 and 2020, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History, Lund University. There, I was part of a project researching the history of the humanities in postwar Sweden. In this project I studied which role humanistic knowledge played in the Christian public sphere, and the voluntary education organizations of the labour movement. This project resulted in a co-written monograph (with Johan Östling and Ragni Svensson), published spring 2022 with Makadam, and an edited volume in 2023 with the same publisher: Humaniora i välfärdssamhället.

I am an affiliated researcher at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK). I have been a visiting scholar at the Ruhr University in Bochum, and at Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. I am director of The International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism (ISHASH), board member of the conceptual-historical research network Concepta, and the Swedish network for the history of political thought (Nätverket för politisk idéhistoria).

My fields of interest are primarily the history of political thought, religion and secularization, and the history of atheist and secularist ideas. I am also interested in the history of the humanities, and the intellectual history of Europe.

At the moment, I am director of studies for History of ideas and science.

I also write occasionally for local cultural journals and newspapers, such as Göteborgs-Posten and Dixikon, and am a board member of Ord & Bild, the oldest cultural journal in Sweden.