Izabela Dahl
Title: Senior Lecturer School/office: School of Humanities, Education and Social SciencesPhone: +46 19 302445
Room: F3147

Research subject
Research environments
About Izabela Dahl
Izabela Dahl is associate professor and senior lecturer in history. Her social constructivist, feminist perspective in empirical studies often focuses on social categorizations and social power relations that are vital not only to migration discourses but also to any studies regarding cultural and social contexts. Through investigations of concrete empirical case-studies and related theoretical frameworks, she tries to contribute with new relevant results in historical studies. In the theoretical-methodological field, her interest concerns discourse and dispositional analysis, intersectionality and intersectional analyzes, narrativity and oral sources in history writing and social discrimination processes. Her empirical research areas are linked to migration / refugee history, the history of anti-Semitism, Jewish history, European memory culture and international relations in European modern and contemporary history.
Current publications are: Reiseberichte als Zeitdokumente: Reisen in polnische Gebiete zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs, a methodologcial article which touches on varies source-critical aspects of travel reports, published in a yearbook of the Historical Research Center in Berlin at the Polish Academy of Sciences 2020 and
Witnessing the Holocaust: Jewish Experiences and the Collection of the Polish Source Institute in Lund concernes a contribution withn 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 is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. For more information regarding the upcoming conference 13-15 October 2021, see:
Women and humanitarian aid - a historisizing perspective
In political history, Dahl's interests consern the Cold War and diplomatic relations with 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 revitalizisation of the European dialogue between East and West. The objective is to deepen source-based knowledge about Swedish and Polish involvment 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 the chronological history courses and the essay courses within the teacher education program. She also conducts open couses as i.e. Migration and Globalization and Perspectives on the Holocaust.
Izabela Dahl has mainly been 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).
Since 2007 she is a member of the network The Jews in Sweden at the Hugo Valentin Center and since 2020 she is a member of the Research Network for Holocaust Studies.
She has been a 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.
Since 2018, she is co-coordinator of the network Politics, Citizenship & Nations at the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC).
Since 2019 is she a member of the International Advisory Board of the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation, Germany.