About the authors

Claes Ahlund is Professor of Comparative Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His published work includes two monographs on Swedish literature and the First World War: Diktare i krig (‘Poets at war’, 2007), on political poetry; and Underhållning och propaganda (‘Entertainment and propaganda’, 2010), on popular war novels.

Gunnar Åselius is Professor of Military History at the National Defence College, Stockholm. He has written on the image of Russia among Swedish security elites before 1914, Soviet naval strategy in the Baltic Sea during the interwar years, and on various aspects of the Cold War and the Swedish army during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the role of history in the education of military officers.

Bjarne Søndergaard Bendtsen is External Lecturer in History at Aarhus University. His Ph.D. thesis (University of Southern Denmark, 2011) deals with Denmark and the First World War: Mellem fronterne. Studier i Første Verdenskrigs virkning på og udtryk i dansk kultur (‘Between the lines: the First World War and Danish culture’).

Nik. Brandal is a postgraduate research student at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, Norway. His main research interest is political extremism. He is currently working on a project comparing the radicalization of the student Left in West Germany and the US in the 1960s, as well as a history of Norwegian volunteers in the First World War.

Eirik Brazier is a Ph.D. Candidate at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His particular fields of interest include cultural aspects of military cooperation in the British Empire, intelligence history, and the legal purge in Norway after the Second World War. He is currently involved in a project that examines Norwegian participation in the First World War.

Claus Bundgård Christensen is Associate Professor of History at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has published three books on the First World War: Danskere på vestfronten 1914–1918 (‘Danes on the Western Front 1914–1918’, 2009); Krestens breve 1914–18 (‘Kresten’s letters 1914–18’, 2012); and Verdenskrigens danske billeder (‘Danish images of the Great War’, 2012). He is currently working on a book about the Waffen-SS.

Anne Hedén is a historian and journalist, and is currently working as a lecturer in history at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her principal research interest is the development of political and social movements, and the prerequisites and conditions that create political activism.

Rolf Hobson is senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, Oslo. He has specialized in German history, and has also worked in the fields of European political history and the history of international law. His publications include a survey, in Norwegian, of the ‘war and society’ approach to international history, and Imperialism at Sea. Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875–1914 (2004).

Tom Kristiansen is Professor of History at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, Oslo. He has written extensively on Scandinavian diplomatic, naval, and military history in the first half of the twentieth century, with particular focus on the relations between Scandinavia and the great powers, and Anglo-Norwegian relations. His latest book is a history of the Norwegian navy in the period 1905–1960, Sjøforsvaret i krig og fred. Langs kysten og på havet gjennom 200 år, ii: Selvstendig og alliert i krig og fred (2010).

Ulrik Lehrmann is Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. His research has focussed on socially distributed reading cultures in the nineteenth century, the history of media and journalism 1860–1950, and crime journalism in the popular press. He has contributed to Dansk mediehistorie (‘Danish Media History’), 1–3 (1996–7) and has published on literary and media topics in Danish periodicals.

Anna Nordlund is Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University, Sweden. Following her Ph.D. in comparative literature, her research has primarily addressed the outward conditions and expression of the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf’s success in the emerging media market about the authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, combining sociological and materialistic viewpoints with analyses of style and narration.

Sofi Qvarnström is Associate Senior Lecturer in Rhetoric at Lund University, Sweden. She is currently working on a project entitled ‘The forest as promise, sacrifice and memory. Representations of Norrland and the industrialization process in Swedish fiction 1880–1920’.

Per Jostein Ringsby has a Ph.D. in history at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, Norway. He wrote his thesis on Scandinavian peace associations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Gjermund Forfang Rongved is a postgraduate research student at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, Norway. His thesis will analyse Norway’s monetary and financial policy during the First World War.

Lina Sturfelt is Associate Senior Lecturer in Human Rights Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests include the cultural history of war (especially the First World War), military history, media narratives, national identity formation, and human rights discourses in a historical perspective. She is currently working on a project about colonial, national, and racist discourses in Swedish peacekeeping during the Cold War.

Nils Arne Sørensen is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. He has specialized in identity politics, and comparative and transnational history, and has published on such topics as fascism, memory culture, public history, Americanization, and the First World War. He is the author of Den Store Krig: Europæernes første verdenskrig (‘The Great War: the First World War of the Europeans’, 2005).

Ola Teige is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of History at the University of Oslo, Norway. His main research interests are Scandinavian social, military and political history in the period 1660–1850, particularly the local elites and their social networks, and Norwegian participation in World War One. He is currently working on a project on corruption in Norway in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in a comparative perspective, and a history of Norwegian volunteers in World War One.