Anders Ekström received his PhD from Uppsala University in 1994 and has held permanent and visiting positions at research institutes and universities in several countries. He was a Fellow of SCAS in 1999 and of CRASSH, University of Cambridge, in 2013. He served as Research Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Uppsala University between 2014 and 2020. He regularly writes and lectures on universities, knowledge politics, and the history of public culture for wider audiences.

Ekström’s early research was shaped by the cultural turn in the historical and social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s. A specialist in the long nineteenth century, he has published major monographs, critical introductions to cultural history and theory, and edited collections and essays on the history of exhibitions, media and science, visual culture, the modern history of suicide, and disaster studies. He has also written extensively on the history and future of the integrative humanities.

During the last decade, Ekström’s research has mainly focused on cultural processes of temporalization, theories of historical time, and late-modern experiences of anthropogenic climate change as a crisis of modern temporality. This is reflected in his most recent books and co-edited volumes, Times of History, Times of Nature (2022), The Return of Time (transl., 2025), and Cultural History and the Anthropocene (2025).

At SCAS, Ekström will continue his theoretical work on late-modern temporalization, and conduct empirical research as part of a project on the temporalization of natural history in the southern Arctic from the late nineteenth century to the present.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.