Patrik Svensson is a scholar, writer, curator and entrepreneur. His most recent monograph is Humane Infrastructures (MIT Press, 2025) and he is currently also engaged in several other initiatives, including Critical-Constructive Tissue and Aspirational Humanities.

Svensson was Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at UCLA 2016-2020, Distinguished Visiting Fellow/Visiting Professor at CUNY Graduate Center 2015-2016, and Professor of Humanities and Information Technology at Umeå University 2012-2020. Svensson is the former Director of HUMlab (2000-2014). He was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) during the Spring Semester of 2022.

Major themes in Svensson’s work include Digital Humanities and Conditions for Knowledge Production. The first theme includes research and practice in relation to the intersection of the humanities and information technology with a particular focus on the history, role and place of the digital humanities. He has expanded this work in the direction of experimental humanities and aspirational humanities, and building university-wide capacity to respond collaboratively to societal challenges and complex problems. 

Conditions for Knowledge Production addresses research infrastructure, spaces for learning and knowledge production, intellectual middleware, presentation software and academic events. Publications include Big Digital Humanities (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Between Humanities and the Digital (co-edited with David Theo Goldberg, MIT Press, 2015) and “’One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at every Occasion for Speech” (with Erica Robles-Anderson. Computational Culture, 2016). This line of work has developed into program building in relation to “Arenas of Transversal Knowledge Production”.

An emerging theme (building on the above) is the role of humane and critical knowledge and competence in relation to to societal challenges and complex problems, especially in relation to socio-technological systems. This topic, investigated in the Humane Infrastructures book, has lead to experiments such as the Infrastructure Clinic (with Sha Xin Wei, Arizona State University) and an interest in the “new university”. 

Svensson’s work seeks to be critical and interventionist. He consults on building spaces, institutions and infrastructure.

Photo credits (unless individually specified) for this site: Patrik Svensson or HUMlab/Umeå University. Photo credit for the site cover photo: Jane Nguyen, Ktown for All.