My life motto? “It’s got to go bang and it has to be fun, otherwise I won’t come”, as Astrid Lindgren’s character Karlsson says in The World’s Best Karlsson (1968).

 

Dr. Erik Wikberg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm School of Economics focused on art and literature. He is also an Assistant Professor in War Studies at The Swedish Defense University, and an Expert Member for non-fiction literature in the Swedish Arts Council. Moreover, he is a columnist, a self-employed consultant and a co-owner of a fin-tech startup (Finc AB). Since 2014, he has written 15 reports on book sales statistics for the Swedish Booksellers Association and the Swedish Publishers Association. All in all, he has more than 70 publications.

His current research is focused on plural institutional logics in the organizational field of Sweden’s literature industry. He has previously studied how different cultural organizations, mainly in the art world, handles contradictory demands. This summer, he publishes two books on Sternberg Press in Germany: Economic Ekphrasis: Goldin+Senneby and Art for Business Education (co-edited with professor Pierre Guillet de Monthoux) and Artful Objects: Graham Harman on Art and the Business of Speculative Realism (co-edited with Isak Nilson).

He was the first Director of Stockholm School of Economics Literary Agenda from 2018 to 2020, a joint collaboration between Stockholm School of Economics and McKinsey & Co. In the second year of the initiative, it had recruited more than 400 students, which was five times more than the aim. The initiative arranged book circles of contemporary fiction literature and had author talks with for example Ian McEwan, Jennifer Clement, Mircea Cărtărescu and Viet Thanh Nguyen at the university college.