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Håkan Möller

Professor

Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion
Mail
hakan.moller@lir.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Håkan Möller

Associate Head of Department for Reserach

Håkan Möller is a theologian and literary historian, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg since 2011. He teaches at the University of Gothenburg, and also at the University of Helsinki. He holds doctorates, in Divinity (1998) and Philosophy (2001) from the University of Uppsala. In 2003 he was approved as Docent (Associate Professor) in Literature at the University of Uppsala and, in 2004, in Scandinavian Literature at the University of Helsinki. During the academic year 1996/97 he was Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Divinity in Cambridge. His early studies were in the interdisciplinary field of Literature and Religion, especially from the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. His doctoral dissertation in Divinity was on the hymnography of Johan Olof Wallin (1779–1839) and the groundbreaking new hymn book of 1819 for the Church of Sweden, (The Wallin Hymn, 1997). His literary dissertation, The Wallin Poem: From the Early Poems to Angel of Death (2000) concerns mainly the poetry of Wallin from his first poems of the early nineteenth century up to "The Angel of Death" (1839), his last major poem. He has recently published a study of one of the most distinguished and famous Swedish authors of the twentieth century, the 1951 Nobel prize-winner in Literature, Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974): Pär Lagerkvist: From a Writer's Tale to the Nobel Prize (2009). He has also published Pär Lagerkvist: The Poet of the occasion and the literary market (2012). These studies deal with the literary career of Lagerkvist, from his early dream of becoming a famous writer to the success of the novel Barabbas (1950) and the award of the Nobel prize in 1951. He is currently writing a book on the Church of Sweden’s 1695 hymn book within the wider context of criticism of luxury, the ideology of royal power, anti-catholicism and the new sensibility and aesthetic of the period. He is also Chairman of the Network for the Study of Literature and Religion, based at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg.