Malin Gregersen

I am an analyst at the executive office with particular focus on quality assurance, research education and good research conduct.

As a historian I am a member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and the research cluster Comparisons and Connections. I hold a PhD in history from Lund University (2010 ) with the thesis Fostrande förpliktelser. Representationer av ett missionsuppdrag i Sydindien under 1900-talets första hälft. I was a postdoctoral researcher with the project "Merchants and Missionaries. Norwegian encounters with China in a transnational perspective, 1890–1937", at Institutt for arkeologi, historie, kultur- og religionsvitenskap, Bergen University. I have since carried out research at Linnaeus university and aditionally coordinate a Nordic research network of women's transnational and migration history.

I have previously held positions as researcher, assistant professor, research education coordinator and international admissions officer. I have also been on the editorial team of the historical journal Scandia, including roles of secretary and web editor.

Teaching

I teach in the Master Programme Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and coordinates the Programme's Master thesis course. Aditionally, I supervise theseses on various topics, including women's and gender history, colonial and cultural history and travel writing. 

Research

My research interests focus mainly on people on the move, cultural encounters and ways of creating meaning. I have taken a particular interest in Scandinavian Protestant missionaries in India and China, but have also carried out studies on Swedish hobos and travel writing.

In my most recent research project I investigate Swedes onboard ocean liners to and from Asia and ways in which encounters onboard contributed to the formation of colonial knowledge. In an ongoing pilot study, I explore passenger narratives of Lutheran missionaries to and from India and China in the early 20th century.

In previous research, I have studied Scandinavian missions to China in the early 20th century from different perspectives. Protestant missionaries in Changsha, the province capital of Hunan, have been in focus of different subprojects, for example analysing missionary experiences and understandings of place making and relationship building. A study of understandings of home will be finished in 2024. 

In my doctoral thesis I investigated how Swedish medical missionaries in early 20th century South India represented their mission not only as a mission of converting people to Christianity, but also of spreading moral and scientific values in order to found an Indian Lutheran folk church. The study particularly focused on how missionaries contributed to the creation of meaning and affected how people in Sweden understood other cultures and their position in the world. On of the main arguments of the thesis is that missionaries primarly saw their mission as a temporary but necessary fostering mission for change rather than that of a permanent tutorship or a race for conversion.