Hampus Östh Gustafsson’s research has covered broad aspects of the modern history of the humanities and/or knowledge, and more recently, temporal conflicts and the work of synchronization in the history of universities. He defended his doctoral dissertation, Folkhemmets styvbarn (Daidalos, 2020), on the legitimacy of the humanities in the context of Swedish politics of knowledge 1935–1980 at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University. Recent publications include The Humanities and the Modern Politics of Knowledge: The Impact and Organization of the Humanities in Sweden, 1850–2020 (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), edited together with Anders Ekström.

In 2023, Östh Gustafsson started the project “The Humanist Diaspora: Migration of Humanists and the Circulation of Knowledge in Swedish Society 1876–1926” at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge, funded by the Crafoord Foundation. The purpose of the project is to trace the extramural migration of academic humanists and analyze the epistemic implications of these societal movements. The study traces patterns of mobility for aspiring scholars from the academic sphere to other vocational areas of society, with a particular focus on scholars who obtained the docent title but never became full professors, in order to investigate the circulation of humanistic knowledge that followed this social migration. The project seeks to determine processes of separation as well as links between the university and educational, political and cultural spheres, and to analyze how these academic émigrés transformed humanistic knowledge through their actions on various platforms. Where did graduates from the humanities actually end up after leaving academia? And what kind of epistemic practices did they still contribute to from the “outside”?

While the period in question has been described as a “golden age” of the Swedish humanities, there is a limited knowledge of the mechanisms that enabled a broad societal circulation and impact of the humanities. The graduates who left humanities faculties for other occupations have often been rendered “invisible” in historiographical accounts. Did all of them become school teachers and civil servants, or do their career trajectories display more diverse practices at “unexpected” sites in society? If so, these types of knowledge actors may have formed a challenge to the increasingly professionalized and specialized academic sphere as they transcended scholarly boundaries and generated novel, non-academic forms of knowledge.

At LUCK, Östh Gustafsson will work closely together with Isak Hammar.