Mattias Viktorin received his B.A. (2001) and Ph.D. (2008) degrees in social anthropology from Stockholm University, and is currently senior lecturer at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University.
Previously he has been a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (2006–2007); Secretary of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (2009–2011); research fellow at Stockholm Center for Organizational Research (2009–2011); and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University (2011–2013). He is the author of Exercising Peace: Conflict Preventionism, Neoliberalism, and the New Military (2008) and co-editor of Antropologi och tid (2013).
Expressing Siberian Exile: Literature, Language, and the Resistance of the Real
In this project I explore nineteenth century narratives of Siberian exile. The writers that I work with––Anton Chekhov, George Kennan, Peter Kropotkin, Henry Lansdell, and others—were all facing difficulties in their attempts to represent the social realities and human experiences of exile. This forced them to experiment with novel modes of expression and representation. As such, their narratives allow for a “re-reading” of some of the constitutive features of early modernism and its reconfiguration of literature, religion, and science.