Research
My research is about how political utopias fail, and why they keep being resurrected. Diplomacy has been carried by the dream of an order in which negotiation replaces war. Communism returns as an idea precisely where it failed as a reality. And the independent central bank rests on the notion that the economy can be governed beyond politics. I follow these utopias through the concepts and history of rhetoric: how they are articulated, how they break down and how they return in new guises.
Current project, 2026–2029
Sustainable Economies? The Swedish Riksbank and Climate Change
How the Riksbank understands and communicates sustainability under its new statutory mandate, and how central bank sustainability rhetoric can be analysed.
Frans Francken the Younger, Death and the Miser, 1635. Wellcome Collection, London.
New project, 2027–2029
The Past, Present, and Future of the Communist Idea in Eastern Europe
The Case of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis
While the failures of actually existing socialism are denounced, the idea of communism is revived as an answer to crises that liberal democracy seems ill-equipped to address. The project follows how the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, led by Slavoj Žižek, moved from criticising communist ideology to defending the communist idea, and what that says about the role of political utopias after the fall of communism.
- How the Ljubljana School understood the failures of actually existing socialism in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe.
- How communism became an answer to the crises of contemporary democracy: populism, the pandemic and climate change.
- The communist idea as a political utopia, and what it reveals about Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
Completed projects
2021–2024
The Return of the Sophists? Post-Truth, Democracy and Rhetoric in the Populist Moment
Traces the figure of the sophist in political thought since the late 1960s to understand what our populist moment says about democracy.
Swedish Research Council, international postdoc
2021–2022
Post-Communist Communism in Eastern Europe
A rhetorical history of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and its idea of communism after communism.
Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies
2019–2022
Translating Cassin into Swedish for the first time, with an introduction to her thought and her place in contemporary French philosophy.
Åke Wiberg Foundation, Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation
2012–2019
Diplomacy: Name, History, Ideology
Diplomacy as an ideological state apparatus, from the French Revolution to the digital age. The basis of the doctoral thesis and the Routledge monograph.
BEEGS, Swedish-French Foundation, Gålö Foundation
Publications
Monographs, edited volumes, articles and chapters in English and Swedish.
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Translations
Barbara Cassin’s work in Swedish: three texts with an introduction in Rhetorica Scandinavica (2016), and a book of translations with an extended introduction to her thought.
Teaching and supervision
Fifteen years of teaching rhetoric at Södertörn University, Uppsala University, and BI Norwegian Business School.
Collaboration, review and supervision
I welcome enquiries about joint projects, conference panels, peer review and doctoral supervision in rhetoric, political theory and central bank communication.