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 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.
1995: Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. London: Routledge. Editor with Vered Amit-Talai.
1988: Twenty Girls: Growing Up, Ethnicity and Excitement in a South London Microculture. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 21. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Journal articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries
2018: “Diversifying from Within: Diaspora Writings in Sweden,” in Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport (eds.), The Composition of Anthropology: How Anthropological Texts are Written. London: Routledge, pp. 122–136.
2018: “Foreword,” in Lauren Miller Griffith and Jonathan S. Marion (eds.), Apprenticeship Pilgrimage: Developing Expertise through Travel and Training. Lanham: Lexington Books, pp. vii-xi.
2017: “Stories of the Soil: In the Irish Literary World,” in Diarmuid Ó Giolláin and Martine Segalen (eds.), Irish Ethnologies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 141–157.
2017: “Greater than Its Size: Ireland in Literature and Life,” in Ulf Hannerz and Andre Gingrich (eds.), Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 301–316.
2017: ”Manhattan as a Magnet: Place and Circulation among Young Swedes,” in Virginia R. Dominguez and Jasmin Habib (eds.), America Observed: On an International Anthropology of the United States. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 31–50.
2017: “Global spridning av lokala teman,” Review article of Crime Fiction as World Literature edited by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosh and Theo D´haen (Bloomsbury 2017). Respons, nr 6, pp 66–68.
2016: “Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer Across and Within Genres,” in Helena Wulff (ed.), The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–18.
2015: “Jazz i Ghana: Musik som kosmopolitism,” in Kulturella Perspektiv, 2(24): 34-38.
2015: “In Favour of Flexible Forms: Multi-Sited Fieldwork,” in Forum: Re-thinking Euro-Anthropology. Social Anthropology, 23(3): 355-357.
2015: “The Pains and Peaks of Being a Ballerina in London,” in Ilana Gershon (ed.), A World of Work: Imagined Manuals for Real Jobs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 207–220.
2015: “Ireland in the World, the World in Ireland”, American Anthropologist, 117(1): 142-143.
2015: “Dance, Anthropology of,” in James D. Wright (editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol. 5. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 666–670.
2013: “Ethnografiction and Reality in Contemporary Irish Literature”, in Marilyn Cohen (ed.), Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology. New York City: Lexington Books, pp. 205–225.
2013: “Dance ethnography”, in Oxford Bibliographies Online. New York: Oxford University Press.
2013: “Ways of Seeing Ireland´s Green: From Ban to the Branding of a Nation”, The Senses and Society, vol. 9, no.2, 233-240.
2006: “Experiencing the Ballet Body: Pleasure, Pain, Power”, in Suzel Ana Reily (ed.), The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking's Ethnomusicology in the 21st Century. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, pp. 125–142.
