Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon

His latest books in English are: Archive, Slow Ideology and Egodocuments as Microhistorical Autobiography: Potential History (London: Routledge 2021); Emotional Experience and Microhistory. A Life Story of a Destitute Pauper Poet in the 19th Century (London: Routledge, 2020); Minor Knowledge and Microhistory. Manuscript Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Co-author Dr. Davíð Ólafsson (London: Routledge 2017); What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2013). Co-author Dr. István M. Szijártó; Wasteland with Words. A social history of Iceland was published in 2010 by Reaktion Books in England.

Sigurður Gylfi has made a number of video performance in recent years both on the importance of microhistory for international scholarship as well of some of his recent publications See also a detailed podcast about his scholarship taken by Petr Jandacek, a microhistorian from the Czech Republic, in November 2021 called #deeptalk.

Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon has done number of research with his friend and fellow historian, Davíð Ólafsson, on how manuscript exchange – the scribal community – as a sociocultural network questions the traditional view of the development of literacy, education and communication in the world. Scribal transmission of texts after the advent of movable-type print technology in Europe has come increasingly under the scrutiny of literary critics, cultural historians, and social bibliographers over the last quarter of a century. The advent of critical and coherent scholarship on the nature and meaning of post-medieval manuscript communications has followed the rise of other fields of socio-cultural history in the post-WWII era, such as the history of literacy, the history of readership, social bibliography, and the history of the book (l'histoire du livre). The role of the scribal medium in creating, transmitting, and preserving literary culture has been re-evaluated in an endeavor that has, in some cases, transformed the established view of cultural and intellectual history. Diverse trends and turns in the historiography of texts add to a strong case for a radical revision of how these practices can be viewed. Revisionist approaches have included an emergent emphasis on agency as the capacity of individuals to act within the social structure that seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have. These restraints come in the form of categories like class, gender, and ethnicity on the one hand, and societal institutions on the other, such as the state, the church and the educational system. Somewhere between the two poles of social structures and individual agency, they propose a view exploring the "in-between spaces" where interaction and communication took place. There they argue that one may find "the third dimension" in the shape of informal, rhizomic networks between individuals and texts that connect in a non-linear and non-authorial manner, and can and will connect in every direction without having any center, core or stem. Their focus has been on what they call "barefoot historians", lay scholars who sat and copied or created material that was handled from farm to farm in the modern period in Iceland (see their book: Minor Knowledge and Microhistory. Manuscript Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge 2017)). They have dubbed this kind of group of lay scholars and popular poets, that can be found around Iceland throughout the long nineteenth century, "barefoot historians" – and it seems fair to see them, and in fact their scribal culture as a whole, as an informal institution, at least on a par with the official institutions.

When Magnússon left the Reykjavík Academy in 2010 around 600 hundred scholars had been part of that community for longer or shorter time. In 2003, Magnússon founded and chaired the Center for Microhistorical Research, which, among other things, runs the international web-page microhistory.org and publishes books on microhistorical issues. He is the editor of the web-journal The Journal of Microhistory with his co-worker and a long-time friend Dr. Davið Ólafsson. Magnússon is the founder and one of three editors of the book series Anthology of Icelandic Popular Culturue which has already published 30 books in cooperation with the University of Iceland Press. The other editors are Dr. Davíð Ólafsson, Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland; Dr. Sólveig Ólafsdóttir a postdoctoral scholar and Dr. Bragi Þorgrímur Ólafsson the Head of the Manuscript Department at the National and University Library.

The following text is mostly based on his book The History War: Essays and Narrative on Ideology (Reykjavik, The Center for Microhistorical Research, 2007) (http://sgm.hi.is), which is autobiographical in nature and deals with historiographical issues such as the development of ideas which are part of the microhistorical agenda. Magnússon is the author of 26 books (http://sgm.hi.is) and has been involved in the publication of fifty more through two book series which he has co-edited with few of his fellow historians; the first one is called Anthology of Icelandic Popular Culture, or in Icelandic, Sýnibók íslenskrar alþýðumenningar, and the second one is called Microhistories published by Routledge. His co-editor is Dr. István M. Szijártó, a Hungarian microhistorian and a long-time friend.

After mostly dealing with the methods of microhistory for over ten years Magnússon turned back to his empirical research in 2007 with the focus on material culture and everyday life, like in his book Wasteland with Words. A Social History of Iceland (2010), was published by Reaktion books in England (see criticism in The Economist: http://economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16213940&fsrc=rss). The book is written as an attempt to explain how the culture of Iceland was formed through a long process of literary practice from the beginning of the settlement in the ninth century up to modern times. It is also an analysis of an island culture, which successfully stepped into the twentieth century without losing its cultural identity. That success story ends with the meltdown of the banking, economic, and the political system in 2008. The focus of the book is on the people of Iceland, how they managed to survive in a relatively hostile environment thorough the centuries and become, for a while, one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The resent sequence of events in 2008 are explained in the light of the historical development in Iceland. This is an experiment in social- and/or microhistorical studies, in which he strives to deal with a long period of time using the methods of microhistory.

It could be argued that the primary objective of many of Magnússon's work has been to present a view of the ways in which history, and in particular social and cultural history, has developed in the last 15–20 years, at a time of major reassessment within the academic world manifested in the radical ideas grouped under the banner of postmodernism and/or poststructuralism. The History War is based on his former research, which he has published in recent years on first hand sources, microhistory and everyday life. That includes the following books: Dreams of Things Past: Life Writing in Iceland (2004) (http://sgm.hi.is); Metastories: Memory, Recollection, and History (2005) (http://sgm.hi.is); Academic Liturgy. Humanities and the Society of Scholars (2007) (http://sgm.hi.is), and finally a book, which he co-edited, called From Re-evaluation to Disintegration. Two Final Theses, One Introduction, Three Interviews, Seven Articles, Five Photographs, One Afterword and A Few Obituaries from the Field of Humanities (2006) (http://sgm.hi.is).

Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon was born in the West End of Reykjavik. He completed his B.A. in history and philosophy in 1984 from University of Iceland. His thesis was published a year later in a book called, The Mode of Living in Iceland, 1930–1940, by the Institute of History at the University of Iceland (http://sgm.hi.is). That same year he started his doctoral studies in Pittsburgh, USA, at Carnegie Mellon University in history where he received a M.A. degree in 1988 and a doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in 1993. His dissertation dealt with popular culture and is titled The Continuity of Everyday Life: Popular Culture in Iceland 1850–1940 Magnússon taught part-time at the University of Iceland and in other academic settings in Iceland from 1994 when he returned from the USA. He taught at his former university, Carnegie Mellon, in the spring of 2002 when he was a Fulbright Scholar for six months. In 1998 he became the first chair of an independent research institute called The Reykjavik Academy, which was founded by independent scholars who received their education in Iceland, Scandinavia, Europe and USA. The colorful saga of the Reykjavík Academy attracted considerable outside attention, from its humble beginnings as a forum for ten independent scholars to its eventually housing 80 researchers from all areas of the humanities and social sciences.

Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon (born August 29, 1957) is an Icelandic historian specialising in microhistory. He was an independent scholar from the time he finished his doctoral dissertation 1993 until 2010. He established the Center for Microhistorical Research at the Reykjavík Academy) in 2003. He got a research position at the National Museum of Iceland named after Dr. Kristján Eldjárn, the former president of Iceland and an archaeologist, in 2010 and until 2013. After that he became a Professor of Cultural History at the Department of History at the University of Iceland.