Patrik Svensson

Senior Global Horizons Fellow, SCAS.
Independent Scholar

Patrik Svensson is a scholar, writer, curator and entrepreneur. He was Visiting Professor of Digital
Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2016–2020, Distinguished Visiting Fellow/
Visiting Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2015–16, and Professor of
Humanities and Information Technology at Umeå University in 2012–2020. Svensson is the former
Director of Humlab at Umeå University (2000–2014).

Svensson’s current work is on conditions of knowledge production, digital humanities, and mobilizing
humane or humanistic competence and knowledge to collaboratively respond to societal challenges and
complex problems. As a practitioner, he is committed to building value-driven, generous, sharp and
deeply collaborative institutions and platforms.

Publications include Big Digital Humanities. Imagining a Meeting Place for the Humanities and the
Digital (University of Michigan Press, 2016), “‘One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every
Occasion for Speech” (with Erica Robles-Anderson, Computational Culture, 5, 2016), and “The Why
and How of Middleware” (with Johanna Drucker, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10.2, 2016). He curated
a large workshop on Humane Infrastructures at UCLA in March 2019.

At SCAS, Svensson will work on his project “Getting Together Anew.” This project examines how
academic events, such as conferences, suggest or impose conditions for knowledge production, how
this infrastructural regime is challenged by developments, such as the climate crisis and COVID-19,
and how it can be shifted through interventionistic practice. Ultimately, the project seeks to explore
new or revised models for academic events in this moment of transformation and opportunity, building
on a series of applied experiments and the “mid-sized substantive event” as an extended case.  


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2021-22.