Professor Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre

Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre is professor of German literature at Stockholm University.

She earned her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, USA, in 1992, with a dissertation on the German author Georg Wickram. Since 1986, Wåghäll Nivre has taught Swedish and German at various universities in Sweden, Germany, and the USA, including Davidson College (1992–94), Högskolan Karlskrona-Ronneby (1994–95), Växjö University (1995–2012), and Stockholm University (since 2004).

Wåghäll Nivre’s research focuses on 16th and 17th-century German literature, with a particular interest in the roles of women, marriage, and family life in early modern German literature. She has also explored early modern biographic writing, panegyrics, and travel narratives. Her smaller projects include publications on German children’s literature, the teaching of literature in the foreign language classroom, and the use of multimedia in language and literature teaching. Her current research examines biographic writing on Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689).

Wåghäll Nivre has supervised nearly twenty Ph.D. students on topics related to German literature and the teaching of literature in the foreign language classroom. She has served as the editor of the journal Moderna språk and of the series Stockholm German and Dutch Studies. She is a founding member of the association Germanistische Literaturwissenschaft in Schweden and the international network Movens: Phänomene ästhetischer und kultureller Grenzüberschreitungen. Additionally, she has been on the board of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies and is a board member of the international network PhDNet Literary and Cultural Studies and The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society.

Wåghäll Nivre has held several administrative roles, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Deputy Vice President for the Area of Human Science at Stockholm University 2018–2023. In this position, she has also undertaken a variety of expert assignments in Sweden and internationally.

Spouse: Joakim Nivre, professor of computational linguistics, Uppsala University. Visiting fellow at Clare Hall September–December 2024. Homepage: https://jnivre.github.io/