Erik Sjöberg
About Erik Sjöberg
About Erik Sjöberg
I am associate professor of history and senior lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies at University of Gothenburg since 2023. I have previously been employed at Umeå University, Mid-Sweden University, University of Copenhagen and Södertörn University, Stockholm.
My research interests lie in modern and contemporary international history, in particular conflict, historical culture, uses of history and memories of mass violence, but also the flow of ideas about modernity, pacifism and cosmopolitanism in both national and transnational contexts.
My Ph.D. thesis, Battlefields of Memory: The Macedonian Conflict and Greek Historical Culture (Umeå University 2011), is a study of the diplomatic controversy over the name and history of Macedonia involving Greece and its northern neighbor (present-day North Macedonia). Specifically, it addresses the various uses of history by local and national politicians, journalists, minority activists, and the scholarly community that underpinned the conflict, in Greece as well as the worldwide Greek diaspora. In that respect, the conflict over the national character of the divided Macedonian region – frozen during the Cold War but reignited by the time of Yugoslavia’s dissolution – is analyzed not so much in terms of a clash between competing nation-states, but rather as founded in domestic political grievances following the uneasy democratization of Greek society and historical culture.
Partially interwoven with the Macedonian controversy was the activism of Greek refugee descendants from Ottoman Turkey for recognition of their historical experience during and after WW1 as genocide, which is the subject of my second monograph, The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016). It charts the evolution of a collective memory, fraught with political-ideological dispute, from a national setting, emphasizing ethnic victimhood, to more “cosmopolitan” communities and ways of remembrance, in which the Holocaust and crimes against humanity set the memory-political agenda. By focusing on a related but less well-known tragedy than the Armenian genocide – the WW1 ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Greek minority and its afterlife in the 20th and early 21st centuries – it contributes to a growing body of scholarship on how societies remember mass atrocities, including but not limited to the Holocaust. The book is the first in-depth academic treatment of the Greek case and has been reviewed in international journals, including Journal of Social History, Slavic Review, H-Nationalism and Hungarian Historical Review.
The complex encounter between the narrow concerns of nationalism and the lofty ideals of internationalism is also the subject of my third monograph, Internationalism and the New Turkey: American Peace Education in the Kemalist Republic, 1923-1933 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Focusing on the case of Robert College, an American-run elite school in Istanbul whose multi-ethnic student body embodied the diversity of the Ottoman Empire, the study addresses the little-researched field of internationalist education in interwar Turkey. It sheds light on the paradoxical relation between two different conceptions of modern society; on the one hand the democratic idealism of American progressive educators, who by aiding the nationalist regime of the “new Turkey” hoped to secure US influence over post-WW1 Middle East, on the other hand Kemalism, Atatürk’s modernizing yet deeply xenophobic ideology.