Pillar head

Ólafur Rastrick is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences. Ólafur’s field of research is modern cultural politics and history and everyday aesthetics. His interests range from the history of hairstyling and jazz music in the 1920 to the synergy of public participation and heritage management in the present. Of special interest are the cultural dynamics of internal/external as e.g. in the practice of scientific racism and the discourse of foreignness. Amongst Ólafur’s current projects is a study of affective relations between old buildings and the emerging multi-cultural public in Reykjavík’s city centre. He is assistant professor of European ethnology at the Department of folklore, ethnology and museum studies at the University of Iceland where he teaches courses on cultural heritage, body culture, cultural menace and Icelandic ethnology. Ólafur has co-edited books such as Constructing Cultural Identity, Representing Social Power (Pisa University Press 2010) and Menningararfur á Íslandi [Cultural Heritage in Iceland: Critical Approaches] (UoI Press 2015 – in Icelandic). A monograph entitled Háborgin (The Citadel) based on his doctoral dissertation on the interrelations between aesthetics and cultural politics in early 20th century Iceland was published by UoI Press in 2013.