Karin Kvist Geverts

I am an Associate Professor in history and the Director of The Institute for Holocaust research in Sweden (IHRS). I work part time at Uppsala University as a researcher in the project "Witnessing for the future. Holocaust, Sweden and Forgotten Early Testimonies" financed by the Swedish research Council (2024-2026) led by Professor Andrej Kotljarchuk (Dnr 2023-05936). Associate Professor Simo Muir also participates in the project.

My research is within Holocaust Studies and Antisemitism Studies and has mainly dealt with Sweden but also the Nordic countries.

I defended my dissertation "A Foreign Element within the Nation. Swedish refugee Policy and the Jewish Refugees 1938-1944" in 2008. It deals with Swedish refugee Policy during the Second World War and the Holocaust focusing on the attitudes towards, and treatment of, Jewish refugees. I show how Jewish refugees were discriminated against on the grounds of race even though the officials at the time rejected any accusations of being antisemites. I argue that this can be explained by the antisemitic background noise - i.e. antisemitism was only recognized as such if it was programmatic and violent and therefore other antisemitic notions and expressions were not understood as such but rather as something "normal" and unbiased within society.

After the dissertation, I have written about Antisemitism as a neglected field of research in Sweden, on the challenges of Holocaust education in Sweden, Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden and I was the expert secretary in the Swedish inquiry about a Holocaust Museum (SOU 2020:21).