Mattias Gardell

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 white 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. 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 white radical nationalism, esoteric fascism, Islamophobia, torture history, political Islam, cultures of resistance, white political violence, the entangled history of racism and religion, contemporary fascist fiction and arts, white racist lone wolf tactics, and white nostalgia and the politics of memory. He has published twelve monographs, and more than a hundred articles, anthology chapters, reports and essays. His latest publications include Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide (Cambridge 2021); “‘The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire’: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction”, Fascism (10:1, 2021) and. “Esoteric Nordic Fascism: The Second Coming of Hitler and the Idea of the People” (Routledge 2022)