My research concerns labour, population, and social structure in Medieval and Sixteenth-century Sweden.
I defended my Ph.D. thesis in history at Södertörn University in 2018, in which I studied various forms of migration in seventeenth-century Sweden. I found that the population was far more mobile than previously assumed, especially in the plains of Southern Sweden, but that most people did not move very far. I also studied urban in-migration, and how the state through legislation forbid emigration.
I am a researcher at the Division of Agrarian History at SLU since Autumn 2019. Here I led the research project "From slaves to servants: the institution of service in Sweden 1250–1600", the results of which is published during the spring of 2023. In this research project I studied how the employment of servants replaced slavery during the Middle ages, as well as the living standards and everyday subordination of servants up until the year 1600.
I am a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge since 2021. My current research project, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council, is called "The labouring poor in Sweden, 1300–1600". One part of the project concerns the living conditions of landless people in Sweden during this era. The second part, which is based on taxation records and salary lists, studies the sixteenth-century population history and social structure, including the effects of the 1565 plague epidemic and the repeated bad harvests around 1570.
