As PI of PASSIM, I’m taking the liberty of opening this new category in the PASSIM blog: a brief presentation of each team member (including then, myself). Currently, I’m Professor of Mediated Culture at Linköping University, Sweden – but I started out in Comparative Literature, defending Global Infatuation—my thesis on Harlequin Enterprises—in 1998. Harlequin was a fascinating topic, and I guess some of the interest I later came to take in intellectual property can be traced back to the branding strategies of the Canadian publisher. But it wasn’t until I came across a speech made by Victor Hugo in 1878 on the need for some sort of international copyright treaty (it materialized as the Berne Convention in 1886) that intellectual property became “my” research field. For almost twenty years now, I’ve been hooked. Some of the focus has shifted, of course. I’ve become less interested in copyright and more interested in patents, research and science – topics I pursued in my latest book Making Marie Curie (Chicago, 2015) and that is now at the center of the PASSIM-project. I’ve never identified myself with a particular discipline, probably because while I have a PhD in Comp Lit, then spent a few years in Library- and Information Science, and now have a professorship in mediated culture (something which basically doesn’t exist as a discipline)…. intellectual property has been the only constant in all of these settings. I’m really looking forward to working with the PASSIM-team and to see what will develop around the project that we have no clue about right now. I remember writing in the ERC-application that “Research projects are not static and predictable units, because if they were they would not be research projects at all.” I’d like to think that I’m an advocate of the peaceful coexistence of structure and serendipity!

What else? There’s a bit more on my website http://www.evahemmungswirten.se but I’m really interested in the political economy of champagne and would love to get a chance to write about champagne as intellectual property. A super-topic, in my mind! Until that day, however, I keep collecting so-called grower champagnes….not a bad way to start future research!