Mattias Gardell

Mattias Gardell is Nathan Söderblom Professor in Comparative Religion, and researcher at the Centre for the Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism. Working with ethnographic methods and text analysis, Gardell explores the intersections of religion, politics, racism and violence. His expertise includes radical nationalism, esoteric fascism, Islamophobia, political Islam, human bombs, torture history, hate crime, the history of racism and religion, fascist culture, and white racist lone wolf tactics.

Mattias Gardell is Nathan Söderblom Professor in Comparative Religion, and researcher at the Centre for the Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism at Uppsala University, Sweden. He took his PhD at Stockholm University in 1995 on the PhD Dissertation Countdown to Armageddon: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam based on several years of fieldwork and interviews in the segregated Black American inner-cities. His first post-doctoral research projects were a comparative study of black and white religious nationalism in the United States (Federativs 1998), and the seminal study on racist paganism, Gods of the Blood. White Separatism and the Pagan Revival (Duke 2003), both involving extensive fieldwork within the white power culture in the US and abroad. Since then, Gardell has continued to draw on ethnographic methods, interviews, and text analysis in exploring the difficult terrain shaped by the intersections of religion, politics, racism, and violence, in various empirical fields, including black and white radical nationalism, white power culture, esoteric fascism, human bombs, torture history, Islamophobia, political Islam, white racist political violence, the entangled history of racism and religion, the affective dimensions of radical nationalism, contemporary fascist fiction and arts, white racist lone wolf tactics, and white nostalgia and the politics of memory. He has published eleven research monographs, and more than a hundred articles, anthology chapters, reports and essays. His latest publications are Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide (Cambridge 2021), and “‘The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire’: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction”, Fascism (10:1, 2021).

Mattias Gardell - Post-Doctoral Research Projects

- White Nostalgia. The Politics of Home and Belonging. Supported supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) 2022-2025

- Angry white men? A study of violent racism, correlations between organized and unorganized hate crime and the affective dimensions of ultranationalism, supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), 2017-2019

- Methodological Laboratories – towards tenable methods to measure discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity and religion. In cooperation with a team of researchers at Multikulturellt Centrum. Supported by the Swedish Research Council [Vetenskapsrådet] 2017-2019

- IMPACT of Religion. Challenges for Society, Law, and Democracy. A Linneaus Research Programme, Centre of Excellence at Uppsala University 2008-2018. Scientific Leader of Theme Two: Integration, Democracy, and Political Culture, consisting of seven distinct work packages. Supported by The Swedish Research Council and Uppsala University.

- Lone Actor Terrorism and Leaderless Resistance, supported by the National Coordinator against Violent Extremism, 2016-2017

- Islamophobia and the Production of Stigmatized Minorities, supported by IMPACT and the Swedish Research Council, 2008-2010.

- The Race Warrior. A White Racist Serial Killer in Malmoe. Supported by The Swedish Research Council and IMPACT, Uppsala University, 2013-2015

- Torture, Terror and Truth: a Study of the Return of Judicially Sanctioned Torture, supported by Uppsala University 2006-2008.

- Human Bombs: Male Warrior Traditions, Cultures of Violence, and Political Religion, supported by the Faculty of Humanities, Stockholm University, 2004-2005.

- Globalization and the Transforming Landscapes of Political Islam, part of the multidisciplinary research program Conflict or Peaceful Co-Existence? Contemporary Christian-Muslim Relations, supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Bank Research Foundation) 2003-2005.

- Gods of the Blood: The Religious Dimensions of the White Power Milieu, part of the multidisciplinary research program National Socialism in Transition. Perspectives on Contextual Analysis, supported by the Swedish Research Council, 2000-2003

- Conspiracy Beliefs and Violence in American Culture, together with Professor Michael Barkun, Department of Political Science, Syracuse University, supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation 1998 - 2000.

- Black and White Religious Nationalism in the United States, supported by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1996-1997

- Globalization and Religion, supported by the Swedish Council for Planning and Co-ordination of Research (Forskningsrådsnämnden), 1995-1996