Helena Wulff

Infobox Person


image_size = 150px
name =Helena Wulff
birth_date = birth date|1954|2|7
birth_place = Stockholm, Sweden
education = Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, Stockholm University (1989)
occupation = Anthropologist, Professor, Stockholm University Helena Wulff (b. Stockholm, Sweden, 1954) is a professor of Social anthropology at Stockholm University. She is best known for her writing on national identity, cultural studies and the anthropology of dance, in particular, the relationship between dance and society, social memory and modernity, and place. She has done ethnographies of ballet companies in Sweden, London, and New York.

About Helena Wulff

Besides Swedish, Helena Wulff is proficient in English and fluent in French and German. In addition to her appointments at Stockholm University, Wulff has also been a lecturer at the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (1993-1996), and a research assistant at the Center for Mass Communication at Stockholm University (1988). She has also been appointed the Stockholm University Social Science Faculty Grant for University Teachers' Professional Development.

Helena Wulff started dance training as a toddler but an injury prevented her from pursuing a professional career at the age of seventeen. She attended a ballet school in Stockholm and was trained by a Latvian couple, a former ballet director and a former principal dancer. Wulff was taught under the Vaganova method, a Russian method of teaching classical ballet.

Education

She has a PhD in Social Anthropology from Stockholm University and a BA in Comparative Literature, and minors in Philosophy, French and Social Anthropology.

"Twenty Girls": Helena Wulff's PhD Thesis

Helena Wulff's PhD thesis, titled Twenty Girls, explored ethnicity and culture in a small group of black and white young teenage girls, most of them being second generation immigrants, in an ethnically mixed inner city area of South London. Wulff studied these girls' microculture within four arenas: a youth club, a street corner, a school and their homes. This thesis also analyzed the relation between ethnic diversity and personal experiences and the influence of parents, teachers, youth workers and the media.

Employment

About Her Work

Transnationality and Ballet

Out of her PhD thesis grew Wulff's interest in studying the relationship between teenagers, young adults, transnationality and culture. Transnationality was also the focus for a research project dealing with ballet as a transnational occupational culture.

Fieldwork in the Transnational Ballet World

Helena Wulff did participant observation and multi-local fieldwork about daily life back stage in three ballet companies: the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm, the Royal Ballet in London, the American Ballet Theatre in New York, and the contemporary ballet company Ballet Frankfurt in Frankfurt-am-Main.

Ethnography in the Transnational Ballet World

Wullf's fieldwork and research resulted in the publication "Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers." In this ethnography, Wulff analyzed the culture and the social organization in dance companies and traced transnational connections between them. Moreover, she analyzed how dancers' careers are reproduced in a network of transnational ideas, meetings and communications.

In the review of "Ballet Across Borders", Carter wrote: "Wulff is suitably qualified for the task. She once studied dance and now is a lecturer in social anthropology; the former field gives her empathy with her subject, the latter an ethnographic model within which to frame her enquiry. A recurrent theme throughout the book is the transnationality of the ballet world. Wary of claiming ballet's language as "universal", Wulff bases her fieldwork in four major companies in Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. She distinguished both common practices and culturally specific ones, such as how nationality forms nuances of ballet style, though the global village of the arts and media is now eroding these nuances." [ Alexandra Carter wrote an interesting review of Helena Wulff's book in "Signs", Vol.27, No.1, (Autumn 2001), pp.271-275. ]

Dance and Technology

Wulff has also examined the social and aesthetic production of dance, dance on television and dance reproduction on video/DVD and the Internet. The result of this research has been the publication "New Technologies at Work: People, Screens and Social Virtuality".

Dance and Culture in Ireland

In December 2007, Wulff published a monograph called "Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland". In the past, dancing at the crossroads in Ireland used to be young peoples' opportunity to enjoy themselves in the country. However, this Irish dance custom was prohibited by the [http://www.setdance.com/pdha/pdha.html Public Dance Halls Act] , which was enacted by the Irish government in 1935. It has contributed to the decline in the practice of traditional music and dance in rural Ireland. As a consequence, the notion of dancing at the crossroads has become a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life. "Dancing at the Crossroads" combines a dance anthropological approach with cultural analysis and also includes debates on memory and mobility, tradition and modernity, and relates them to dance and culture in Ireland.

Anthropology of Emotions and Visual Culture

Wulff has published articles regarding emotions and visual culture and she has currently been commissioned by Berg Publishers to edit "The Emotions: A Cultural Reader". Wulff's new articles will apply comparative cultural perspectives to the study of emotions and their relation to culture.

elected Publications

Monographs

*Forthcoming, 2007"Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland", Oxford: Berghahn Books.
*1998, reprinted 2001"Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers", Oxford: Berg, 185 pages.
*1988Twenty Girls: Growing Up, Ethnicity and Excitement in a South London Microculture, Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 21, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 193 pages.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

*Forthcoming, 2007"Longing for the Land: Emotions, Memory and Nature in Irish Travel Advertisements", "Identities", 14(4).
*2005"Memories in Motion: The Irish Dancing Body", "Body & Society", issue on "the dancing body", edited by Bryan S. Turner, vol.11(4):45-62, 17 pages.
*2003"Steps and Stories about Ireland", "Choreographic Encounters", vol. 1: 70-74, 4 pages.
*2002"Yo-yo Fieldwork: Mobility and Time in a Multi-Local Study of Dance in Ireland", "Anthropological Journal on European Cultures", issue on Shifting Grounds: Experiments in Doing Ethnography, vol.11: 117-136, 19 pages.

Peer-reviewed Book Chapters and Encyclopedia Entries

*Forthcoming, 2007"Introduction: The Cultural Study of Emotions, Mood and Meaning", in Helena Wulff (ed.), "The Emotions: A Cultural Reader". Oxford: Berg.

*Forthcoming, 2007"To Know the Dancer: Formations of Fieldwork in the Ballet World", in Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely (eds.), "Knowing How to Know". Oxford: Berghahn Books.

*Forthcoming, 2007"Visuella kulturstudier", in Bodil Axelsson and Johan Fornäs (eds), "Kulturstudier i Sverige". Lund: Studentlitteratur, with Karin Becker.

*2006"Experiencing the Ballet Body: Pleasure, Pain, Power" in Suzel Ana Reily (ed.), "The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking's Ethnomusicology in the 21st Century". Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 16 pages.

*2005"'High Arts' and the Market: An Uneasy Partnership in the Transnational World of Ballet", in David Inglis and John Hughson (eds.), "The Sociology of Art",. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 11 pages.

*2004"Bild och rörelse i dansfotografi", in Patrik Aspers, Paul Fuehrer and Árni Sverisson (eds.), Bild och samhälle. Stockholm: Studentlitteratur, 18 pages.

*2004"Feld, Steven". Entry in "Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology", pp.153-154. London: Routledge, 2 pages.

*2004"Sanjek Roger". Entry in "Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology", pp.443. London: Routledge, 1 page.

*2003"Introduction: From People of the Book to People of the Screen", in Christina Garsten and Helena Wulff (eds.), "New Technologies at Work". Oxford: Berg. With Christina Garsten, 6 pages.

*2003"Steps on Screen: Technoscapes, Visualization and Globalization in Dance", in Christina Garsten and Helena Wulff (eds.), "New Technologies at Work". Oxford: Berg, 17 pages.

*2003"The Irish Body in Motion: Moral Politics, National Identity and Dance", in Noel Dyck and Eduardo P. archetti (eds.), "Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities". Oxford: Berg, 17 pages.

*2002"Aesthetics at the Ballet: Looking at 'National' Style, Body and Clothing in the London Dance World", in Nigel Rapport (ed.), "British Subjects". Oxford: Berg, 17 pages.

*2001"Dance, Anthropology of" in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.), "International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences", pp.3209-3212. Oxford: Elsevier, 4 pages.

*2000"Access to a Closed World: Methods for a Multi-Locale of Ballet as a Career", in Vered Amit (ed.), "Constructing the Field". London: Routledge, 14 pages.

*1998"Perspectives Toward Ballet Performance: Exploring, Repairing and Maintaining Frames", in Felicia Hughes-Freeland (ed.), "Ritual, Performance, Media". London: Routledge, 16 pages.

*1995"Introducing Youth Culture in Its Own Right: The State of the Art and New Possibilities", in Vered Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff (eds.), "Youth Cultures". London: Routledge, 18 pages.

"Inter-racial Friendship: Consuming Youth Styles, Ethnicity and Teenage Femininity in South London", in Vered Amit-Talai and helena Wulff (eds.), "Youth Cultures". London: Routledge, 17 pages.

* 1994"Moratorium på Manhattan: Unga svenskar och globalisering", in Johan Fornäs et al. (eds.), "Ungdomskultur i Sverige". FUS-rapport nr.6. Stockholm: Symposium, 16 pages.

References

ources

* Communications via email with Helena Wulff
* "Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers", Oxford: Berg, pages 1-2.
* [http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/Signs/v27n1toc.html Signs Journal]

External links

* [http://www.bergpublishers.com/us/book_page.asp?BKTitle=Ballet%20across%20Borders Berg Publishers, Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers]
* [http://www.socant.su.se/pub/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=6286 Helena Wulff, Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Stockholm]