Oscar Hemer
Professor emeritus/emerita

Presentation

Professor of Journalistic and Literary Crearion. Dr. Philos. in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo (2011) on the dissertation "Fiction and Truth in Transition : Writing the present past in South Africa and Argentina" (Lit Verlag, 2012). Writer of several novels and with a twenty year experience as an arts journalist and editor. He was the initiator of the one-year Master program "Communication for Development" and its coordinator from the inception in 2000 to 2014. His latest own works are the essay Borgesiana (2021), which is his personal reflection on the work as co-editor and translator of the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges in Swedish (Borges I-III, Tranan, 2017; 2019; 2020) and the experimental literary anthropology monograph Contaminations & Ethnographic Fictions: Southern Crossings (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). The latter is the result of a largely self-financed research project on racialisation and creolisation in South Africa, which he started as a visiting research fellow at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2015. Currently, he is the principal investigator of the artistic research project Conviviality and Contamination, with focus on South Africa and the participation of some of South Africa's leading writers and researchers. Hemer is a member of the research platform Rethinking Democracy (REDEM) and of South Africa Sweden University Forum (SASUF). In parallel with his research, he has lately translated large parts of Jorge Luis Borges' work to Swedish and written two literary works; the above-mentioned essay Borgesiana and the novel Familj: en fiktion (Family: a fiction), to be published in 2022.