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Kenneth Nyberg

Senior Lecturer

Department of Historical Studies
Telephone
+46 31-786 45 09
Mail
kenneth.nyberg@gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Room number
J607
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Kenneth Nyberg

I am a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor of History and received my PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 2001. After a few years as a postdoctoral researcher in a project at Uppsala University I returned to Gothenburg, where I have primarily worked since. Over the years, I have combined research, teaching and supervision with administrative and management roles at departmental, faculty and university level. Much of my teaching has taken place within the history teacher education programme, for which I have also served as director of studies and academic adviser. In recent years in particular, however, I have also taught a broad range of stand-alone courses, with an emphasis on the early modern period (c. 1500–1800), theory and methodology, and the supervision and examination of theses at Bachelor’s and Master’s level. I am currently also the principal supervisor of two doctoral students, Stefan Aguirre Quiroga and Pierre Strandberg.

Most of my research has, in various ways, concerned Swedish travellers in other parts of the world, particularly East Asia and South America, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the letters, diaries and travel accounts they left behind, I have studied the travellers’ perceptions of peoples and cultures outside Europe and what these reveal about their own self-image and the relationship between Sweden and the world beyond Europe. I have also been interested in how scientific travel in the eighteenth century was organised and carried out in practice, and in the motives and expectations behind these journeys. This in turn has led me to examine questions concerning the relationship between this kind of travel and global historical phenomena such as long-distance trade and colonialism.

Since the early 2010s, I have maintained a strong interest in how the development of digital technology affects research and teaching in history, and what this will mean for the role of historians in the long term. Although I have not conducted any digital history research projects of my own, I have written several texts of varying length and character—both introductory surveys and more specialised theoretical and methodological discussions—on historians and digital technology. This partly reflects a broader interest of mine in questions concerning the production of historical knowledge, both within and beyond the academic discipline.

Further details about my research and full-text downloads of some of my publications can be found on my personal website. It also contains links to some of my larger projects and an abridged CV.