Dag Herbjørnsrud




Dag Herbjørnsrud is a historian of ideas, author, a former editor-in-chief, and a founder of Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas in Oslo. He has published for Aeon, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, Open Culture, etc, and is currently the editor of a special issue of the journal Cosmopolis, on decolonizing. Herbjørnsrud sits on the Editorial Review Board of the book series Global Epistemics at Rowman & Littlefield.
In the Norwegian book "Global Knowledge", and in an essay on the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas, he argues for the need of a "global history of ideas". In May 2019, he published the article "Beyond decolonizing: global intellectual history and reconstruction of a comparative method" in the journal Global Intellectual History. He proposes a global comparative method for the discipline, based on the three concepts of "context, connection, and comparison." Herbjørnsrud has held lectures on global perspectives, Eurocentrism, and decolonizing the Academy at the University of Cambridge, Royal Holloway, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and Berliner Festspiele.
Herbjørnsrud was the editor-in-chief of the Norwegian weekly left-wing news magazine Ny Tid from 2005 to 2015; formerly a reporter and op-ed-writer for the conservative newspaper Aftenposten. As an editor of Ny Tid, Herbjørnsrud contributed to the production of the TV and Netflix thriller Occupied, in which he was played by the actor Øystein Røger. He is the son of writer Hans Herbjørnsrud and historian Anna Tranberg.
Herbjørnsrud is a cand. philol. of history of ideas on an English-language thesis on Robert Nozick. In an interview with the liberal-conservative periodical Minerva, Herbjørnsrud stated that Nozick advocated the welfare state, and that Anarchy, State, and Utopia is not representative for Nozick's writings. In 2004-05, he was a columnist for Al-Jazeera's English website.

Selected Works

In cooperation with Stian Bromark he has written three non-fiction books in Norwegian: