Anthropologist
Helena Wulff (born February 7, 1954) is professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research is in the anthropology of communication and aesthetics based on a wide range of studies of the social worlds of literary production, dance, and the visual arts.
Academic work.
While Wulff early research was on youth culture and ethnicity, her specialist skills include expressive cultural form (dance, art, images, text) in a transnational perspective, visual culture, the emotions, and media, as well as anthropological methods. She has conducted field studies in Stockholm, London, New York City, Frankfurt-am-Main, and Ireland (mostly Dublin). Wulff's current research is on migrant writing in Sweden. Drawing on her research, she teaches courses on Media anthropology, Visual Culture, Communication and Aesthetics, Anthropological Writing Genres, and Anthropological Methods.
Wulff has held visiting professorships at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National University of Singapore, University of Vienna, and University of Ulster, as well as a Leverhulme visiting professorship at University of East London. She was Editor-in-Chief (with Dorle Dracklé) of "Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale", the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), and Vice President of EASA. She was Chair of the Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT). Wulff is a member of the steering committee of the multidisciplinary research programme Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences 2016-2021.
Wulff is an editor (with Deborah Reed-Danahay) of the book series “Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology” (Palgrave, New York), and editor (with Jonathan Skinner) of the book series “Dance and Performance Studies” Berghahn Books, Oxford, and a member of the advisory boards of the journals "Anthropologica", "Anthropological Journal of European Cultures", "AnthroVision", "Cultural Sociology", "Culture Unbound", and "Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale".