Sverre Bagge CV

Born 1942 in Bergen, cand. philol. 1970, dr. philos. 1980, both at the University of Bergen. Taught medieval history at the University of Bergen since 1973, from 1991 as a professor. Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, 1979-80 and life member of the college, Directeur d'études associé at Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, 1992, Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, 1995, Visiting Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, 1996. Lectures and research visits to several other universities: Copenhagen, Uppsala, Stockholm, Reykjavík, Oxford, London, Berkeley, Seattle, UCLA, Sydney, Augsburg, Rotterdam, Bonn, Münster, Frankfurt, Munich, Zürich, Basel, Freiburg, Göttingen, etc. Participated in the project The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, funded by The European Science Foundation, 1988-92. Participation with papers at a number of international conferences; e.g. invited speaker at the Norwegian National Sociology Conference, 1994; main speaker at the Conference of the American Medievalist Association of the Pacific 1995; invited keynote speaker at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study in Urbana, Illinois, 1997; invited speaker at the Fourth Meeting of the International Society for the Classical Tradition, Tübingen, 1998; invited keynote speaker at an international conference organised by the University of Hull, 1999; invited speaker at an international conference in Berlin, 1999; organiser of a session at the 11th International Saga Conference in Sydney, 2000. Leader of the project The Individual in the European Cultural Tradition, funded by the NRC, 1992-95. Leader of the project The History of Power in Norway (Part of the interdisciplinary project on Power in contemporary Norway, initiated by the Norwegian government) 2001-02. Editor of Historisk tidsskrift (The Norwegian Journal of History) 1981-84 and editor in chief of Scandinavian Journal of History since 1996. Member of the editorial board of The Journal of Medieval History, and of the programming committee for the International Medieval Congress, Leeds. Head of Dept. of History, 1984-85 and 2002-, member of the Committee for History, NRC 1993-98, chairman 1996-98. Supervisor of a number of theses in history at 'hovedfag' and doctoral level. Coordinator for the doctoral programme at the Dept. of History since 2000. Member of selection committees for professorships at Oslo (1994), Uppsala (1995), Roskilde (1996), and Aarhus (1999-2000). Organiser or co-organiser of several national and international conferences: The Nordic conferences in historical methodology 1987, 1989, and 1991; conferences on the project The Individual, including international ones in 1992 and 1994, conference of Norwegian and French historians in Caen in 1993 funded by NRC, conference in Norway in French with Jacques Le Goff as key speaker in 1997, funded by NOR-FA.

Within the CMS, my main responsibility will be to coordinate the research and education programme and to develop the CMS's international networks. My previous experience from university and research administration and international cooperation will be useful in this respect. Further, I have a long-time interest in interdisciplinarity, comparative and international research. In my studies of Norwegian history, I have always been interested in the wider European background. During the last ten years or so, I have also taken up primary research on European material. This work has so far resulted in articles and books on selected works in German, Old Norse, Byzantine, and Italian historiography and biographical literature (Bagge 1989, 1991b, 1993a, 1996b, 1996c, 1996d, 1997c, 2000a, 2001b, forthcoming 2002). My comparative work has brought me into contact with a number of colleagues and milieux in other countries and increased my interest in the different scholarly traditions in countries like the UK, France, Germany, and the USA. As for interdisciplinarity, my studies, based on individual texts, of political thought and historiography are closely connected to disciplines like philology and literary studies, and my studies of state formation and the relationship between society, culture, and ideology to the social sciences. The project The Individual included scholars from history, philosophy, art history, and social anthropology, which was a very stimulating experience.

In addition to my responsibilities as leader, I also intend to contribute to the individual projects on historiography and state formation, topics which have been my main field of interest during the last ten years or so. I plan to extend my studies of medieval historiography to other geographical areas, notably a comparison between works from the periphery and the centre, and further, to deal more directly with the various ways of understanding the origin of kingdoms and nations. The main focus of my research during the nearest years to come will be on early state formation, as co-leader of the Cambridge-Bergen project and as leader of the CMS's state formation project. I have previously worked on the early formation of the Norwegian kingdom, on political culture from the Viking Age to the 13th century and on political institutions, royalist ideology and the development of law and royal justice in the High Middle Ages (Bagge 1987, 1992, 1993b, 1995, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2001b). Further, my historiographical studies will form an important background for my work on state formation, as they have dealt with the understanding of society and with political culture and behaviour in the narrative texts.

I have also been interested in broader aspects of medieval culture and society, such as political thought (Bagge 1987, 1994, 2000b), science (Bagge 1994), religion (Bagge 1989, 1996e, 2001a), and the arrival of writing. I have recently dealt with a number of these topics in a general overview of Norwegian intellectual history in the Middle Ages with particular emphasis on the change from an oral to a literate culture (Bagge 2001a).

Publications registered in FRIDA