Johan Östling

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of History, Lund University

Johan Östling received a Ph.D. from Lund University in 2008 with a doctoral dissertation
about Swedish experiences of Nazism in the aftermath of the Second World War. His thesis
was awarded several prizes, including the Clio Prize and the Nils Klim Prize. Östling was a
SCAS Fellow in the spring of 2013 and the autumn of 2014. During the academic year 2013–
14, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam
and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG) in Berlin.

Östling’s research combines intellectual, political and cultural history. He has written extensively
on modern and contemporary European history, in particular on historiography, the legacy of
National Socialism and academic ideals in twentieth-century Germany. In recent years, he has
developed a more general interest in the history of knowledge.

In 2016 he published his second monograph, Humboldts universitet: Bildning och vetenskap i
det moderna Tyskland (an English translation is forthcoming in 2018). A revised translation of
his dissertation was published in 2016 by Berghahn Books, Sweden After Nazism: Politics and
Culture in the Wake of the Second World War. In addition to chapters and articles in various
scholarly publications, Östling has also co-edited Nordic Narratives of the Second World War:
National Historiographies Revisited (2011) and The Humboldtian Tradition: Origins and
Legacies (2014).

As a Pro Futura Fellow, Östling has focused on the transformation of the Humboldtian tradition
and the idea of the university in modern Germany. Central to the project is the seismic shift in
the ideal of the university in the twentieth century – from Berlin to Bologna.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2017-18.