Izabela Dahl

About Izabela Dahl

Izabela Dahl is associate professor and senior lecturer in history. Her main research interests concern modern and contemporary European history. Her projects are linked to the fields of migration and refuge studies, humanitarian aid and relief activities, history of anti-Semitism, Jewish history, European memory culture and international relations in the Baltic Sea area with special attention put to democratization processes.

Her analysis is driven by interest in social power structures and social categorisations which pre-condition cultural and social contexts. Epistemologically her work is inspired by discourse analysis, intersectionality, narrativity and the use of oral sources in history writing, as well as source pluralism. Sensitivity to gender dimension, processes of social inclusion and exclusion, and social categorization are often applied approaches in investigated empirical studies.

Recently published: From victim to survivor of Nazi persecution. Gendering the collection of the Polish Research Institute (PIŹ) in Lund, a contribution in the journal "Der Archivar" 2/22. The article scrutinizes why and how gender matters to this collection and seeks for seeks for possible explanations to the fiasco of funding applications that led to the shutdown of the short-lived but still unique project in 1946. The contribution is a part of the special issue Women at the archive (Frauen im Archiv).

Witnessing the Holocaust: Jewish Experiences and the Collection of the Polish Source Institute in Lund concerns a contribution within the project Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden: Archives, Testimonies and Reflections which was published in Palgrave Macmillan 2021. The project was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and coordinated by colleagues at Uppsala University.

Research projects

Women and their humanitarian efforts for refugee reception in Sweden from a historical perspective is a project that deals with social-historical issues and the historicization of the concept of humanitarian aid where the philanthropic tradition meets the current development of aid policy. Within the project, exemplary empirical knowledge is created around questions about, how and to what extent gender equality and a rights-based perspective have played a role in humanitatian aid historically. The project was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. 

In political history, Dahl's interests concern the Cold War and diplomatic relations within the Baltic Sea region. The focus is on diplomatic contacts between Poland and Sweden 1956–1974. In addition to the empirical study of Swedish-Polish bilateral relations during the 1960s and 1970s, she studies Swedish foreign policy's role for revitalization of the European dialogue between East and West. The objective is to deepen source-based knowledge about Swedish and Polish involvement in peace policy solutions in Europe and to map the early Swedish aid to the Polish democracy movement.

Teaching

In Örebro, Izabela Dahl mainly teaches chronological history courses and essay courses within the teacher education program. She also conducts topic couses as i.e. Migration and Globalization and Perspectives on the Holocaust.

At the advanced level, Izabela Dahl teaches oral history at the University of Gothenburg.

She taught doctoral courses addressing different theoretical and methodological aspects of historical studeis at Gothenburg university and at Bielefeld university in Germany.

Previously, Izabela Dahl was active at Humboldt University in Berlin (HU), the University of Technology and Economics in Berlin (HTW Berlin), the University of Gothenburg (GU) and Karlstad University (KAU).

Member of the network The Jews in Sweden at the Hugo Valentin Center since 2007 and  member of the Research Network for Holocaust Studies since 2020.

Member of the editorial board of the journal  Nordeuropaforum (ISSN: 1863-639X) since 2005.

She has been collaborating with the European Commission on various research administrative assignments since 2014 and since 2018 she has been part of the Migration Research HUB, IMISCOE funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program within the framework of the grant agreement Ares (2017) 5627812-77012.

External censor for candidate exams at Department of Archeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen since 2018.

Co-coordinator of the network Politics, Citizenship & Nations at the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) since 2018.

Member of the International Advisory Board of the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation, Germany since 2019.