Tommy Gustafsson

Tommy Gustafsson got his PhD in History with a dissertation on gender relations, sexuality and racial stereotyping in Swedish film culture in the 1920s, a book that in a revised version was published in the US as Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: A Cultural Analysis of 1920s Films (McFarland, 2014). Since 2012 he is employed as senior lecture of Film Studies at the Department of Film and Literature where he primarily teaches courses on film history. In 2015 he was promoted to Professor of Film Studies at Linnaeus University.

Besides research on historical representations on gender and ethnicity in film and television he has an interest in the relationship between film/television and history, primarily how audiovisual history is communicated to public audiences. Within this area he has published one monograph on how Swedish Public Television tried to teach history to its child viewers during the 70s (“Det var en gång: Historia för barn i svensk television under det långa 1970-talet”, 2014). Currently he is writing a book on the transnational historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where he analyzes Swedish television news, the large international production of feature films and feature-length documentaries on the genocide, and also the contemporary film and television production in Rwanda in order to perceive how the memory of the genocide against the Tutsis has been constructed, re-created and used in accordance to altering aesthetical, political, spatial, and temporal circumstances. In connection to this project he was invited as a guest scholar to the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Rwanda in Kigali during the spring semester of 2015.

He has also, together with Pietari Kääpä, edited the two international anthologies, Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (Intellect, 2013) and Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Marketplace (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).