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Per Sivefors

Senior Lecturer

Department of Languages and Literatures
Mail
per.sivefors@gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Per Sivefors

RESEARCH

My research falls broadly within the early modern period, and while I have recently begun to explore more contemporary contexts, I still have a focus on how early modern literature has been received and re-contextualised.

Among my previous projects are one on the representations of dreams in early modern literature and culture, focusing on authors like Shakespeare and John Lyly, and one on early modern urban culture which was also part of an international project entitled Tolerance and the City, directed by Professor Roy Eriksen. I also have a long-standing interest in Elizabethan pamphleteer and satirist Thomas Nashe, which has resulted in a series of articles from 2005 onwards.

My interest in early modern satire resulted in the most significant of my previous projects. This was funded by the Swedish Research Council and focused primarily on how masculinity was represented during the short-lived vogue for verse satire in the 1590s, by authors like John Donne and John Marston. That research resulted in a book entitled Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590 – 1603: ‘A Kingdom for a Man’ (Routledge, 2020). Its basic thesis is that the representation of manhood in this body of texts is generally at odds with early modern patriarchal ideals, and represents a masculinity that is frequently weak and unstable. Apart from this book I also contributed essays to among others Renaissance Studies and English Literary Renaissance, and co-edited a more broadly focused collection with Manchester University Press, on the transformations and mediations of satire over the early modern period and into the nineteenth century.

My current project, on which I collaborate with Nely Keinänen (University of Helsinki), focuses on the reception history of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries. The project argues for the need to move beyond narrowly defined ‘national’ histories of Shakespeare towards a broad perspective on both regional and international culture. It sees the history of Shakespeare not simply as one of a single centre and various peripheries, but as a series of shifting and interlocking centres over time – between Nordic countries, which share much of their cultural and linguistic history, but also between Northern Europe and the non-Anglophone world (such as France, Germany and Russia).

So far, the project has resulted in two edited collections with Bloomsbury’s series Global Shakespeare Inverted (Arden Shakespeare) and a special issue of Critical Survey, in addition to various publications in journals and anthologies. We are currently at work on a study investigating the uses of Shakespeare in the emergence of Finnish and Swedish democracy during the period 1850 – 1950, including the use of Shakespeare in the growth of publicly funded cultural institutions such as theatres, but also how criticism and other public discourse approached Shakespeare as a political thinker. I have recently taken an interest in how Shakespeare is represented in Swedish fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular focus on representation of class and work and how Shakespeare is politicized in such contexts.

Here in Gothenburg, I am also a member of the Early Modern Seminar, which has organised a number of international conferences and other events. For more information about the Seminar, see here.

TEACHING

Over the years I have taught a very wide range of courses at all academic levels from first-term to doctoral level, mostly with a focus on early modern material, including courses on Shakespeare, on islands as a literary topos in history, on satire, and overview modules on literary history and theory. I have also supervised a large number of essays on the BA and Master’s levels as well as two PhD dissertations.

BIO

I received my PhD from the University of Gothenburg/Blekinge Institute of Technology in 2004, and have since worked at the then University of Gotland (2004-2010), Linnaeus University (2009-2023), Karlstad (2024) and at Gothenburg as of 2025. I have also been a visiting scholar at the University of Sussex (2017) and a guest teacher at the University of Agder (2004, 2007) as well as the University of The Gambia (2012).