Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon

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.

He is married to Dr Tinna Laufey Ásgeirsdóttir, a Professor of Economics at the University of Iceland, and they have one son, Peter Bjarni, who is Sigurður Gylfi stepson.

colourfulrful 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.

The History War is based on his former research published in recent years on first-hand sources, microhistory and everyday life.

After mostly dealing with the methods of microhistory for over ten years, Magnússon turned back to his empirical research in 2007 with a focus on material culture and everyday life, like in his book Wasteland with Words.

A Social History of Iceland (2010) Archived 2013-01-28 at the Wayback Machine, 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.

The book focuses on the people of Iceland and how they managed to survive in a relatively hostile environment through the centuries and become one of the world's wealthiest countries for a while.

The focus of the research is twofold: Firstly, emphasis is put on exploring the phenomenon of "archive"; how an image of the past is preserved and how people and their material environment are documented in historical sources.

Other archives of material culture will be counter-posed, thus revealing opportunities to scrutinise the various ideas about the past from a new perspective, simultaneously providing a new foundation for reviewing academics and scholarship.