At the intersection between cultural history and the history of science, I examine how daily routines and attitudes have shaped human understanding of what the world looks like. I am particularly interested in the concepts around which people construct their worldviews, and how these worldviews are continuously formed and renegotiated in relation to spatial and bodily experiences. My research primarily focuses on the early modern period, c. 1550–1800.

In my ongoing project, Is Winter Coming? Early Modern Interpretations of the Seasons Around the Baltic Sea, I investigate how people in 17th-century Sweden experienced seasonal changes and linked these experiences of weather and climate to understandings of the body and identity. I am particularly interested in how Ancient Climate theory was articulated in relation to a Nordic climate, and in how eastward travelers interpreted weather and climate. This project will run from 2024 to 2030 and is funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

In the project A State of Undress: Health and Morality in the Swedish Sauna, ca. 1600-1800, funded by the Swedish Research Council, I explore how perceptions of health and moral behavior were expressed within the early modern sauna culture in Sweden and Finland. My particular focus here is on how a room—the sauna—which served multiple purposes (in addition to bathing, it was also used for activities such as minor medical procedures, food preparation, sleeping, and socializing) reveals early modern attitudes towards the body, health, and the boundaries of socially accepted practices.

In my forthcoming book, Mapping the North (fall 2025), I use a long term perspective to investigare how people have visualized the northernmost parts of the world through maps, from antiquity to the early 20th century. I discuss cultural encounters in the north and how indigenous cartographic traditions and perspectives have been incorporated into, or excluded from, dominant narratives. I also examine how representations of climate and environment have been politicized and exoticized in relation to the idea of the north in various ways through history.

My doctoral dissertation, The Old, the New, and the Unknown: The Continents and the Making of Geographical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Sweden (2018), addresses how travelers and scholars in 17th-century Sweden made sense of their world and the roles that the continents—Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Magellanica—played in this process. Based on an analysis of a broad range of handwritten materials, printed works and maps in Latin and Swedish, I show how travelers and scholars actively participated in creating new representations of a changing world.