Bo Stråth (born 1943) is a professor emeritus. He was the 2007-2014 Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor in Nordic, European and World History and Director of Research at the University of Helsinki. From 1997-2007 he was Professor of contemporary history at the European University Institute, Florence and from 1991-1996 Professor of History at Göteborgs Universitet. Member of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Visiting fellow/professor at Universität Kiel and Glasgow University (Alexander von Humboldt Fellow), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collegium for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (SCASSS) in Uppsala and at Aarhus universitet, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Universität Bielefeld, Saitama Daigaku, Tokyo Daigaku (Todai, Japan Foundation Fellow), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main, Lunds universitet, Stockholms universitet (SCORE), Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS) and University of Barcelona. He has been a member of the International Committeee for Social History and member of several selection committees, advisory boards and editorial boards.
Details as to curriculum and research
Once upon a time, this was the first and only individual professorial homepage on the website of the European University Institute. The Institute’s first webmaster asked Bo Stråth to create it as a test case, and they began the experiment together. The late James...
An experiended need for new world history, an alternative to the globalization narrative, was behind the initiation of this project in 2008. An alternative with a focus on how we conceptualize cohabitation on Earth, realizing that humans are not the only inhabitants, as opposed to the story about the transportation of commodities on a world market without borders where human labour, too, became commodities. This experienced need for a new conceptualization in 2008 has since then gained profile and precision in the argument for a planetary perspective on cohabitation on Earth.
2009-2013 Between Restoration and Revolution, National Constitutions and Global Law: an Alternative View on the European Century 1815-1914 (EReRe) Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian and African Semantics of the Social...
Bo Stråth was born in 1943 in Jönköping, Sweden. Under this tag his journey since then is outlined
There is a lack of a more realistic history that rejects teleological understandings of Europe as a self-propelling project on a steady march towards a predetermined goal. A lack of a history that emphasises the fragility of European peace and progress, so evident today, This project was initiated to respond to this experienced lack.
Here are listed the seminars and workshops from the autumn of 2007 to the end of 2008 at the Helsinki University that prepared the two projects Europe 1815-1914: Creating Community and Ordering the World and Conceptual History and Global Translations. The seminars and the projects dealt with fact-finding missions into the past with normative questions about the future in the back of the mind, questions about a better world, whatever that means. Here is also the last conclusing seminar of the Europe 1815-1914 project in 2013.
The project Conceptual Histories of the World and Global Translations that started in 2008 was a joint venture between Bo Stråth, Helsinki Uniersity and Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Århus University. Here texts and photos from the project's conferences until 2012 as well as its method, theory, and organization.
Perceptions of social inequality at a European level were behind the initiation of this project. An important question was whether the emergence, interpretations and regulations of social inequalities is transformed by new centre-periphery structures in the EU. The project addressed the tension in the fact that EU is an economy but not a polity, a market but not a state. The focus was on the tension that emerges when social disintegration in the wake of market integration cannot be matched by redistributive politics to adjust for inequalities however they are defined.
The focus of this project was the diversity and plurality of cultural orientations and, moreover, ever-shifting cultural practices within Europe. Historical ruptures challenge continuities and instability coexist with stabiity.
To connect Bo Stråth’s research interests with those of the PhD researchers working with him at the EUI, they organized several seminar series initiated by the researchers as a joint venture. The focus was on theory and methodology questions connected to the practices of historians. There were often invited guests to broaden their intellectual input.
