Stockholm university
Denna sida på svenska

Stefan HelgessonDeputy Vice President for Human Science, Professor

About me

I received my Ph D from Uppsala University in 1999 and have been a senior lecturer in literature in the English Department in Stockholm since 2010. In March 2011 I became full professor. Besides my years in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, I was also fortunate enough to spend an extended period from 2003 until 2005 as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg.

I am currently (as of January 2024) the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Vice Rector for Human Science. In this capacity, I chair the Board of the Faculty of Humanities and the Research Committee of Human Science. I am also the vice chair of the Board of the Area of Human Science and a member of the Board of Stockholm University. In addition, I lead the faculty's Budget Committee and the meetings with the Heads of Department.

My thesis explored the work of the three South African writers Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee in relation to the political upheavals of the 1980s. Contrary to common assumptions concerning "anti-apartheid literature", and with a grounding in postcolonial theory, I argued that it was the literariness of their work - rather than its topicality - that enabled its most profound engagement with prevailing historical conflicts.

Since completing my thesis, I have been involved in a number of research projects. These include the research programme ”Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts” that ran from 1999 until 2006, as well as my two individual projects on post-Second World War literature in Southern Africa and ”Inventing World Literature”, a study of translations of and translation in the work of Mia Couto, Clarice Lispector, Assia Djebar and J. M. Coetzee. Over the years, my work has taken a comparative turn, with a special focus on writing in English and Portuguese. In this context, my postcolonial interests have evolved in dialogue with translation theory and current debates on world literature. I was involved in the multidisciplinary research programme Time, Memory and Representation, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2010-2015), completed yet another individual research project called “Beyond Herder: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in Postcolonial Literatures”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2013-2016), and led from 2016 to 2021 the large-scale research programme ”Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures”, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

My research activities have enabled me to establish a broad international network and I cooperate regularly with colleagues from Scandinavia, the UK, France, Portugal, Brazil, USA and southern Africa. I am also on the editorial boards of English Studies in Africa, French Studies in Southern Africa, Safundi, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, The Journal of World Literature and the book series “African Articulations”.

I am an elected member of Academia Europaea since 2018 and of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities since 2023.

Besides academic writing, I contribute occasionally as a critic to Dagens Nyheter. In 2004 I published Efter västerlandet, a collection of postcolonial essays, and 2010 saw the publication of my novel, Leve fortsättarna. In 2018, I published (together with Marcia Schuback) a Swedish translation from the Portuguese of the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa’s collection of short stories, Primeiras estórias.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • World Literatures

    2018. .

    Book (ed)

    Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange.

    As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the one-sided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market.

    How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values?

    Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.

    Read more about World Literatures

  • The Ethos of History

    2018. .

    Book (ed)

    At a time when rapidly evolving technologies, political turmoil, and the tensions inherent in multiculturalism and globalization are reshaping historical consciousness, what is the proper role for historians and their work? By way of an answer, the contributors to this volume offer up an illuminating collective meditation on the idea of ethos and its relevance for historical practice. These intellectually adventurous essays demonstrate how ethos—a term evoking a society’s “fundamental character” as well as an ethical appeal to knowledge and commitment—can serve as a conceptual lodestar for history today, not only as a narrative, but as a form of consciousness and an ethical-political orientation.

    Read more about The Ethos of History

  • Translingual Events

    2018. Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg. Journal of World Literature 3 (2), 136-152

    Article

    This article outlines a theory of world literary reading that takes language and the making of boundaries between languages as its point of departure. A consequence of our discussion is that world literature can be explored as uneven translingual events that make linguistic tensions manifest either at the micro level of the individual text or at the macro level of publication and circulation—or both. Two case studies exemplify this. The first concerns an episode in the institutionalization of Shakespeare as a global canonical figure in 1916, with a specific focus on the South African writer Sol Plaatje’s Setswana contribution to A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. The second case discusses how Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones (1998) evokes the bodily and affective charge of boundary-making by troubling the border between Haitian and Dominican speech.

    Read more about Translingual Events

  • "Literature", Theory from the South and the Case of the São Paulo School

    2018. Stefan Helgesson. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5 (2), 141-157

    Article

    With methodological support in Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of historical semantics, and an empirical focus on the Brazilian critic Antonio Candido (1918−2017), this article approaches “literature” as a layered concept that will always fail to function as that “plane of equivalence” that Aamir Mufti sees as an outcome of the Orientalist episteme. This failure is historical in the strongest sense; it derives from the condition that “history is never identical with its linguistic registration,” as Koselleck puts it. A concept will therefore, throughout its life span, always encompass a combination of persisting and new meanings. In this way, Candido and the São Paulo school of criticism that he was instrumental in forming can be read as a strong instance of “theory from the South” that exploits the malleability of the concept from within its historical situatedness and contributes thereby to the conceptual worlding of literature.

    Read more about "Literature", Theory from the South and the Case of the São Paulo School

  • Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Conceptual Worlding of Literature

    2017. Stefan Helgesson. Anglia. Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 135 (1), 105-121

    Article

    The central claim of this article is that the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, known above all for his advocacy of African-language writing, performs in his essays a conceptual worlding of literature that serves to diversify its semantic content and thereby enable the recognition and expanded production of otherwise marginalised literatures. The logic of this conceptual worlding is read through a cosmopolitan-vernacular optic, which presupposes that Ngugi's interventions can neither be defined as ethnically particularist nor as expansively cosmopolitan. Rather, his approach 1) combines multiple literary 'ecologies', in Alex Beecroft's sense, and 2) attempts to reroute the temporality of 'literature' so that it is no longer reducible to Eurochronology. What unites these interventions is that they both draw on and attempt to recalibrate 'world literature' as a symbolic value in response to a postcolonial predicament. Three texts provide the empirical focus of the article: the department circular "On the Abolition of the English Department" that Ngugi co-authored in 1968 with Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba; the essay "Literature and Society", first written in 1973; and "Memory, Restoration and African Renaissance", which is the third chapter in Something Torn and New from 2009.

    Read more about Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Conceptual Worlding of Literature

  • Tayeb Salih, Sol Plaatje and the Trajectories of World Literature

    2015. Stefan Helgesson. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2 (2), 253-260

    Article

    A crucial theoretical question in world literature studies concerns the dual trajectories of extroversion and introversion, and how they relate to or even are predicated on each other. By discussing the examples of Tayeb Salih and, in particular, Sol Plaatje, this article tries to demonstrate that although the current turn towardmore “introverted” literary studies can be seen as justifiably critical of single-system modes of world literature theory, an attentiveness to the combined and contradictory trajectories of extroversion and introversion will enable a more situated and localized form of world literature studies that nonetheless evades the risk of reifying nationalor linguistic provenance. This also requires a stronger conception of reception history not as a transparent vessel for the literary object, but as an active agent in rendering specific texts or authorships readable as introverted or extroverted.

    Read more about Tayeb Salih, Sol Plaatje and the Trajectories of World Literature

  • Postcolonialism and world literature

    2014. Stefan Helgesson. Interventions 16 (4), 483-500

    Article

    The disciplinary fields of postcolonialism and world literature are currently engaged in some sharp exchanges over the global study of literature. With Mia Couto and Assia Djebar as its test cases, this article assesses and expands the debate. While postcolonial and world literature scholars clearly have some common ground, misunderstandings as well as disagreements prevail. More importantly, however, there are evident disciplinary blind spots on both sides that call for a combination of methodologies to account for literature as grounded in local, conflictual histories and as a circulational phenomenon that moves across languages and literary fields. Insofar as literature is a globally transportable institution, it cannot be understood exclusively in terms of political power and domination, but also as a world of its own and an enabling alternative to other domains of power. Conversely, the article argues, given the tensions between their subjective position and the transnational valency of literature, writers from colonies and postcolonies are of specific and paradigmatic importance to the theorization of world literature.

    Read more about Postcolonialism and world literature

  • Radicalizing Temporal Difference

    2014. Stefan Helgesson. History and Theory 53 (4), 545-562

    Article

    This article is an attempt to address on a theoretical level an antinomy in postcolonialapproaches to the question of temporal difference. Current scholarship tends bothto denounce the way in which the others of the Western self are placed notionally inanother time than the West and not only analytically affirm but indeed valorize multipletemporalities. I elaborate on the two problematic temporal frameworks—linear developmentalismand cultural relativism—that belong to a colonial legacy and generate theantinomy in question, and then proceed to discuss possible alternatives provided by aKoselleck-inspired approach to historical time as inherently plural. I thereby make twocentral claims: (1) postcolonial conceptions of multiple temporalities typically, if tacitly,associate time with culture, and hence risk reproducing the aporias of cultural relativism;(2) postcolonial metahistorical critique is commonly premised on a simplified and evenmonolithic understanding of Western modernity as an ideology of “linear progress.”Ultimately, I suggest that the solution lies in radicalizing, not discarding, the notion ofmultiple temporalities. Drawing on the Brazilian classic Os sertões as my key example,I also maintain that literary writing exhibits a unique “heterochronic” (in analogy with“heteroglossic”) potential, enabling a more refined understanding of temporal difference.

    Read more about Radicalizing Temporal Difference

  • João Paulo Borges Coelho, João Albasini and the Worlding of Mozambican Literature

    2013. Stefan Helgesson. 1616: Anuario de literatura comparada 3, 91-106

    Article

    In O Olho de Hertzog (2010), set in the immediate aftermath ofthe First World War, the Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges Coelho presentsa cosmopolitan panorama of colonial south-eastern Africa. «Mozambique» emergeshere not primarily as a Portuguese colonial space but as a site of multipleentanglements between interests: transnational and local, European and African,South African and Mozambican, British and German, colonial and proto-nationalist.In such a way, and differently from previous Mozambican literature, O Olhode Hertzog performs a complex act of worlding that exceeds the bounded colonial/national space of Mozambique, but resists synthesis. This cosmopolitanismcan be read expressive of the strained relations and constitutive hierarchies ofcolonial society as well as, by implication, of contemporary globalisation. Themost important index of such a critical cosmopolitanism is the trope of the «twoworlds» of Lourenço Marques, embodied in the central character João Albasini,legendary mestiço activist and founder of the proto-nationalist journal O BradoAfricano (1918-1974). Albasini functions as a Virgil for the protagonist HansMahrenholz’s descent into the colonial inferno of Mozambique. Not least byciting documentary material –Albasini’s editorials and shop signs in LourençoMarques– Coelho problematises the divisions of the colonial city, sustained byinternational capital, and provides a sharp contrast to the otherwise dominant«European» narrative of novel, which revolves around a fabled diamond andwhite South African intrigue.

    Read more about João Paulo Borges Coelho, João Albasini and the Worlding of Mozambican Literature

Show all publications by Stefan Helgesson at Stockholm University

Edit the profile