Associate professor of history and education. Director of doctoral studies.
Henrik Åström Elmersjö is associate professor of history and education, and director of doctoral studies at the Department of Historical, Philosopical, and Religious Studies. In 2013, he defended his dissertation discussing the interaction between historical cultures in the Nordic countries within the framework of a "pan-Nordic" textbook revision. Since then, he has continued to research the history and conditions of the school subject of history in various projects. He is part of the research environment "History and Education", and the Umeå Research Centre for Social Studies Didactics (UmSOD). Read more about UmSOD.
Ongoing and completed projects include: "An authorized history" (Postdoc-project), where Elmersjö researched the renegotiation of the history subject within the framework of The Swedish Government Approvement Scheme's reviews and approval of history textbooks between 1938 and 1991; "Individuals and collectives in Swedish history and social studies teaching" (Umeå School of Education), where he studied the changes in the description of individuals and different collectives within the framework of the syllabi for history and social studies in Swedish secondary school between 1970 and 2017; "Controversial Issues in Social Science Education" (Swedish Research Council) where Elmersjö primarily studies how history teachers handle potentially controversial issues in their teaching in secondary schools; and "Teaching Rival Histories" (Swedish Research Council), where history teachers' epispemological ideas and how these can affect teaching is examined in a comparative study involving teachers in Sweden and Quebec.
Elmersjö is also the senior editor for the Nordic Journal of Educational History.
Elmersjö is mainly teaching (and acts as supervisor) on courses related to history teacher education.