Sune Bechmann Pedersen

I currently teach these courses (in Swedish)

• History I: World History and Swedish History: Modern Times
• History II: Historical Research
• History II: The Digital Revolution and the Discipline of History
• MA-level: Theory of Knowledge and Scientific Ethics in the Historical Science
• MA-level: Historical Methods
• PhD-level: Introduction to the Doctoral Programme in History
• PhD-level: From Text to Tech: Digital Literacy and the Transformation of
  History

I am happy to supervise projects about tourism, cultural encounters and international politics from c 1850 to the present. I also welcome thesis topics on European integration, the Cold War, cultural memories, cinema and digital history.

I am external advisor to Anna Breidenbach's PhD-project "Legal Guests. Politics of Tourism in Central Europe, 1908-1939" (European University Institute)

I currently lead two research projects: Architects of Mobility about the history of tourism governance and expertise since the 19th century and Digitizing the Discipline about early uses of computer technology by historians and the consequences for the making of historical knowledge.

Architects of Mobility: Experts, Institutions and the Making of International Tourism

This collaborative book project with Igor Tchoukarine (University of Minnesota), funded by the Swedish Research Council, examines how the rise of leisure travel in the nineteenth century prompted scholars to study tourism, civil society organizations to advocate for it and governments to support it. What had long been an exclusive activity became a shared concern for academic, civic and state institutions across Europe. These actors broadened public understanding of tourism, developed norms and standards and promoted professional expertise. The book thus shows how tourism governance emerged as a distinct policy field long before it was appropriated by authoritarian regimes or embedded in the postwar reconstruction of Europe. By focusing on the experts who drove these processes, the book shifts attention away from tourists and destinations to the infrastructures of governance and the ideals that sustained them. It reveals how tourism was framed as a public good—linked to health, peace and prosperity—and how this framing has justified state intervention and international collaboration since the nineteenth century.

Digitizing the Discipline: Early Computing and the Making of Historical Knowledge

In this new project with Freja Morris (Lund University) we analyse the impact of computing technologies on historical research in the Nordic countries since the 1960s. The project examines when, why and how historians began using computing technology, how the adoption reshaped everyday research practices, and its impact on the epistemic foundations of historical research.

Completed projects

In the project Holidays behind the Iron Curtain, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2018-20 and based at Lund University and University of Amsterdam, I studied the politics and practices of western tourism to Communist Europe. In this project I published articles on diplomatic negotiations over tourism, the selling in the West of holidays behind the Iron Curtain, the production of tourist guidebooks to Eastern Europe, and the street photography of Georg Oddner in the Soviet Union.

I completed my doctoral project, Reel Socialism, in 2015 at Lund University. In this project I studied cinema and memories of the communist past in Germany and the Czech Republic after 1989.

For publications and research activities prior to my employment at Stockholm University, see the Lund University Research Portal.