Gunlög Fur

I earned a Ph.D. in history in 1993 from University of Oklahoma. My dissertation dealt with Swedish relations with Lenape Indians in the New Sweden colony in eastern North America during the middle of the 17th century, compared with concurrent contacts between Sami people and the Swedish Crown.

Teaching

I have a background as a secondary school teacher and love teaching, but in recent years my time has been filled with other tasks. I have created and taught many courses on undergraduate as well as graduate levels focusing on indigenous histories and rights, American history, colonialism and cultural encounters, gender and sexuality, and on theories and methods in historical studies. Many of these courses have been team taught with colleagues from other disciplines, such as comparative literature, gender studies, law, and religious studies.

Research

Cultural encounters, gender, and postcolonial perspectives, as well as oral history and the uses of history form the focus of my research interests. Borders, or margins, are the words that best characterize my research. I have focused on colonialism, cultural encounters and gender to investigate what happens when people meet and draw lines that differentiate, create, and alter relations between collectives and individuals. Margins and border-crossing is of great relevance to questions of gender and colonization. For one thing, it is apparent that in colonial settings Europeans paid great attention to the regulation of gender relations and marriages. For another, margins form a good tool for thinking about and illuminating women and gender in historical source materials.

My research primarily concerns Native American history and is focused on different aspects of cultural encounters from the 17th century until the present. The historical experiences of other indigenous peoples, such as the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia, offer comparisons that I have found to be useful. Although I have mostly researched periods prior to 1800 it is apparent that notions formed during the early modern period significantly influence present-day academic divisions as well as general perceptions regarding races, ethnic groups, genders, and cultures. History and anthropology as disciplines, as well as formations of knowledge and theories of history, thus become important objects of study. So do the uses of and struggles for history, as well as oral (other-than-written) sources and their relations to the written record.

Building the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, which was established in 2012, has led to an increased focus on Nordic colonialism. I collaborate with scholars from all the Nordic countries in describing and interrogating the participation and complicity of the Nordic region in European colonial expansion and its consequences for contemporary relations.

My most recent projects focus on the concurrent histories of Swedish/Scandinavian emigrants and indigenous nations in North America during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Commissions

Deputy Vice-Chancellor, with responsibility for Sustainability and Equality, 2021-2023

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, 2016-2020

Research Director for Linnaeus University Centre: Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, 2012-2016

Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, from 2014