Anna Blennow

Senior Lecturer

Department of Languages and Literatures

Telephone

+46 31-786 17 69

Mail

anna.blennow@sprak.gu.se

Visiting address

Renströmsgatan 6

41255 Göteborg

Room number

D439

Postal address

Box 200

40530 Göteborg

About Anna Blennow

I have been employed as a lecturer and researcher in Latin at the Department of Languages and Literatures since 2014, and I also work as an essayist and writer on cultural matters. I teach Latin at first- and second-cycle levels, and also teach in other courses within and outside the Faculty. In 2011, I developed the Latin Epigraphy course (LAT202, 7.5 credits), the first of its kind in the Swedish higher education sector, and has since been offered every two years in partnership with the Swedish Institute in Rome.

Between 2020 and 2025, I am employed 50 per cent within the Modes of Modification research programme, financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (RJ). In this research programme, I am studying the arrival of Latin in the Nordic region during the early Middle Ages, mainly based on the Latin epigraphy that is preserved from that period. Together with runologist Alessandro Palumbo of the University of Olso, I have also studied inscriptions that use both runes and the Latin alphabet, and the bilingual epigraphic manuscript culture that we have been able to demonstrate existed during the early Middle Ages in the region of Falköping in the province of Västergötland in Sweden. The project’s website can be found here: https://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/research/projects/modes-of-modification/index.html

Previous research projects

I defended my thesis at the University of Gothenburg in 2006 in medieval Latin epigraphy in Rome. From 2008 to 2013, I had a post as a research assistant at the University of Gothenburg. Within this project I worked on a scholarly edition of Sweden’s medieval Latin inscriptions from the 1100s until about 1250. The project was published in Historiska Museets skriftserie 2016.

During this period, I also led the international network INSCRIPTA for research on Latin inscriptions (financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation - RJ).

In 2013–2016, together with literary studies researcher Stefano Fogelberg Rota, I led an interdisciplinary, international collaborative project on the history of the guidebook focusing on the city of Rome and entitled Topos och Topografi – staden Rom och guidebokens födelse. The project was based at the Swedish Institute in Rome, and aimed to examine the origins and development of the guidebook and to identify how the functions and characteristics of the guidebook gene have evolved over time and influenced modern guidebooks. The project was published in the book Rome and the Guidebook Tradition, De Gruyter 2019. We also organised a guidebook exhibition at the Carolina Rediviva Library in Uppsala. Both the research publication and the catalogue of the guidebook exhibition are freely downloadable in digital form (see under Publications). In connection with the project, I also published a popular science book entitled Guide till det medeltida Rom, Appell förlag 2020.

I have also contributed to a history project about Gothenburg’s first professor in Latin, Vilhelm Lundström, and the study trip to Rome that he led in 1909, which eventually led to the establishment of the Swedish Institute in Rome in the 1920s. In a project funded by the Anna Ahrenberg Foundation, I researched the Gothenburg patron of the arts Anna Ahrenberg and her role in cultural and scholarly exchange between Gothenburg and Rome in the first half of the 1900s – activities pursued by Ahrenberg with Vilhelm Lundström for many years.