
Helena Wangefelt Ström is a PhD Candidate in Museology at Umeå University, Sweden. She is working on a thesis on heritagisation of religion as an act of control, employing a case study on early modern Swedish travellers to Rome and Venice. Her Master degree from Uppsala University in History of Ideas and Science (2011) explored the relation to Catholic artefacts and memories in 17th century Lutheran Orthodox Sweden. During past years she has been awarded the C M Lerici scholarship which allowed her to spend one academic year in Rome and Venice.
In the late 1990’s she was part of a cataloguing project on Queen Christina’s manuscript collection in the Vatican library. She has had several bursaries and scholarships from, among others, the Swedish Institute in Rome and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, to work in libraries and archives in Rome and Venice.
Helena has co-arranged international workshops in Rome and Umeå connected to topics on religion, heritage and cultural contexts. She has presented papers in international conferences in various fields such as sociology of religion, cultural history and critical heritage studies, and arranged a session in the ACHS conference in Canberra (2014) on sacredness, heritage and authenticity. She is a member of research groups EMoDiR (Early Modern Religious Dissent and Radicalism, www.emodir.net) and UGPS (Umeå Group for Premodern Studies).
Helena has published articles in Swedish academic peer-reviewed journals, among which ”Heligt – Hotfullt – Historiskt. Kulturarvifieringen av det katolska i 1600-talets Sverige” (2011) in Lychnos, annual for History of Science and Ideas in Sweden. She has articles accepted and under preparation for an international anthology (planned for publication in 2016).
Research interests include contemporary heritage politics, uses of the sacred past, religious heritage in conflicts, religious controversy, early modern history, history of collections and museums, relics and sacred materiality, and Italian – Scandinavian relations in the early modern period.
In the late 1990’s she was part of a cataloguing project on Queen Christina’s manuscript collection in the Vatican library. She has had several bursaries and scholarships from, among others, the Swedish Institute in Rome and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, to work in libraries and archives in Rome and Venice.
Helena has co-arranged international workshops in Rome and Umeå connected to topics on religion, heritage and cultural contexts. She has presented papers in international conferences in various fields such as sociology of religion, cultural history and critical heritage studies, and arranged a session in the ACHS conference in Canberra (2014) on sacredness, heritage and authenticity. She is a member of research groups EMoDiR (Early Modern Religious Dissent and Radicalism, www.emodir.net) and UGPS (Umeå Group for Premodern Studies).
Helena has published articles in Swedish academic peer-reviewed journals, among which ”Heligt – Hotfullt – Historiskt. Kulturarvifieringen av det katolska i 1600-talets Sverige” (2011) in Lychnos, annual for History of Science and Ideas in Sweden. She has articles accepted and under preparation for an international anthology (planned for publication in 2016).
Research interests include contemporary heritage politics, uses of the sacred past, religious heritage in conflicts, religious controversy, early modern history, history of collections and museums, relics and sacred materiality, and Italian – Scandinavian relations in the early modern period.
Sessions auxquelles Helena Wangefelt Ström participe
11:00
11:00
- 16.00 Worshipping the Past, Heritagizing Religion. How did the (Un)Holy Alliance between Churches and Heritage Come to Be?
- Participant.e Helena Wangefelt Ström (Umeå University) |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Partie de: Religion as Heritage - Heritage as Religion?
- “Why museums are the new churches.” This was the title of an essay on BBC Culture (June, 2015), where the author reflected on how museums and ar...
- Paper
Sessions auxquelles Helena Wangefelt Ström assiste
12:30
12:30
- Registration UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS Main hall
- 12:30 - 17:30 | 5 heures
- Welcome Coffee UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS Ground Floor Hall
- 12:30 - 17:30 | 5 heures
- Pause
13:00
13:00
- Pre-Conference Tour: Mile End, the Crossroads of Three Cultures UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS Registration table (meeting point)
- 13:00 - 15:30 | 2 heures 30 minutes
- The west of Mile End is the fruit of the unlikely encounter between a French-Canadian artisans’ village, a new suburb at the turn of the 20th centu...
- Tour
17:00
17:00
- Opening Ceremony and Cocktail
- Inscription req. Concordia, Grey Nuns Motherhouse (GN) - Former Chapel
- 17:00 - 19:30 | 2 heures 30 minutes
- Welcome addresses and cocktail, followed by the Concordia Signature Event "The Garden of the Grey Nuns". As the opening ceremony and cocktail...
- Cocktail
9:00
9:00
- Keynote : What does heritage change? Le patrimoine, ça change quoi? (Lucie K. Morisset)
- Inscription req. UQAM, pavillon Judith-Jasmin (J) - Salle Alfred-Laliberté
- 9:00 - 10:00 | 1 heure
- What if we changed our views on heritage? And if heritage has already changed? While, on the global scene, s...
- Keynote with simultaneous translation / Conférence avec traduction simultanée

11:00
11:00
- 14.00 Heritagization and Religionization of Islamicate Culture in Europe
- Participant.e Dr Klas Grinell |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Partie de: Religion as Heritage - Heritage as Religion?
- This paper will argue that European framings of Islamicate cultural heritage shows how interpretations of the secularization and re-sacralizatio...
- Paper
- 13.50 Heritage Ontologies: Understanding Heritage as Future-Making Practices
- Participant.e Rodney Harrison (University College London) |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Partie de: Heritage Futures / Utopian Currents I
- While it is customary to think about heritage as a series of practical fields oriented toward the past, it is perhaps less often the case that w...
- Paper
- Religion as Heritage - Heritage as Religion? UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS-M320
- 11:00 - 17:00 | 6 heures
- Since the beginning of the 19th century religious buildings and artefacts of the West have been involved in a continuous process of musealization. ...
- Regular session
18:30
18:30
- Keynote: Is Tangible to Intangible as Formal is to Informal ? (Michael Herzfeld)
- Inscription req. UQAM, pavillon Judith-Jasmin (J) - Salle Alfred-Laliberté
- 18:30 - 20:00 | 1 heure 30 minutes
- Most of what we experience as heritage emerges into conscious recognition through a complex mixture of political and ideological filters, including...
- Keynote with simultaneous translation / Conférence avec traduction simultanée

9:00
9:00
- 09.30 Making and Re-making Russian Old Believers' Heritage
- Participant.e Miss Cristina Clopot (Heriot Watt University) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Partie de: Changing Places, Changing People? Critical Heritage(s) of Diaspora, Migration and Belonging II
- This paper will question the current heritagization processes of a displaced community, the Russian Old Believers of Romania. These people left ...
- Paper
14:00
14:00
- Keynote: Renaming, Removal, Recontextualization of Heritage: Purging History, Claiming the Present, Imagining the Future? (What Change-Role for Heritage Professionals?) (James Count Early)
- Inscription req. Musée des Beaux-Ars de Montréal - Cummings Auditorium
- 14:00 - 15:30 | 1 heure 30 minutes
- "What does heritage change?" is a multifaceted question to which the answer(s) are in primary respects related to real-life negotiations among dif...
- Keynote with simultaneous translation / Conférence avec traduction simultanée

7:30
7:30
- Beyond Re-uses: The Future of Church Monuments in a Secular Society | Au-delà de la conversion: l'avenir des églises monumentales dans une société sécularisée
- Inscription req. Église Saint-Michel - Église Saint-Michel
- 7:30 - 15:30 | 8 heures
- __ Please note that this session is scheduled in a distant location from the main conference; transportation will be provided to regi...
- Regular session
- 11.30 The Heritagization of Religion: Heritagization Processes in Swedish Policies on the Built Heritage of the Church of Sweden since 1920
- Participant.e Tobias Harding (University of Jyväskylä) |
- 7:30 - 8:00 | 30 minutes Partie de: Beyond Re-uses: The Future of Church Monuments in a Secular Society | Au-delà de la conversion: l'avenir des églises monumentales dans une société sécularisée
- Cultural heritage has been defined as “culture named and projected into the past, and simultaneously, the past congealed into culture.” This is ...
- Paper
9:00
9:00
- 09.30 Cultural Heritage as a Means of Development in the Wake of Ethnic Conflict: Kosovo, 2000–2008
- Participant.e Professor Mattias Legnér (Uppsala University) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Partie de: Contested Pasts: Urban Heritage in Divided Cities
- Built cultural heritage was at the centre of the Kosovo conflict of the 1990s, symbolizing either Serbian or Albanian ethnicity. As they had bec...
- Paper
13:30
13:30
- Heritage and the New Fate of Sacred Places | Le patrimoine et le destin des lieux sacrés
- Inscription req. Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal (St. Joseph Oratory) - Salle Raoul-Gauthier
- 13:30 - 17:00 | 3 heures 30 minutes
- While historical churches are being abandoned all over the Christian West, more and more places are growing the opposite way: pilgrimage sites are ...
- Regular session
- 13.45 Religion-to-Religion Adaptive Reuse: Retaining Sacred Use and Re-conceptualizing Built Heritage in Canada
- Participant.e Candace Iron (Humber College) |
- 13:30 - 14:00 | 30 minutes Partie de: Heritage and the New Fate of Sacred Places | Le patrimoine et le destin des lieux sacrés
- Historically, Canada’s cultural and religious heritage has been associated with Christianity. Contemporary Canada is, however, multicultural and...
- Paper
19:00
19:00
9:00
9:00
- Post-Conference Tour: Les églises converties de Montréal | Recycled Churches in Montreal UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS Registration table (meeting point)
- 9:00 - 16:00 | 7 heures
- Tour