Alf Stefan Helgesson

Stefan Helgesson is professor of English Literary Studies at Stockholm University and has been the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. His strong personal connection with southern Africa is reflected in his extensive scholarship on southern African literature in English and Portuguese. Beyond this, he has also worked on Brazilian literature and, above all, on comparative and theoretical aspects of postcolonial writing, world literary circulation and intellectual history. In addition, he has an interest in temporality and historiography in relation to the long history of decolonisation, which can be noted in his current project at STIAS. He is, most recently, the author of Decolonisations of Literature: Critical Practice in Africa and Brazil after 1945 (2022) and co-author (with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen) of Literature and the World (2020). His most recent co-edited volume is Literature and the Work of Universality (2024, ed. Duhan, Helgesson, Kullberg and Tenngart). Stefan Helgesson is the vice-president of the ICLA research committee Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (CHLEL) and an elected member of the Academia Europaea and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters.