The History of Education Society (UK)’s Presidents’ Award for Distinguished Contribution to the History of Education 2025, has been conferred upon Professor Daniel Lindmark.
The triennial Award seeks to celebrate the longstanding contributions made by individuals to furtherance of the history of education. This provides the Society with the opportunity to profile an individual’s work, to draw attention to it, celebrate it, and say ‘thank you’ from peers for what has been achieved. The Award panel were unanimous in their recommendation to confer the award, noting that The Society has great pleasure in awarding the honour in recognition of sustained and significant contributions to the field.
The nomination highlighted the work that Lindmark has undertaken since earning his PhD degree in history with a rich thesis on popular education in early modern Sweden (1995). In 2004, he was appointed Full Professor in history at Umeå University, with a focus on teacher training and professional educational work, and in 2015 Full Professor of Church History and History and Education. As a testament to his outstanding achievement in these two fields, he received an honorary doctorate of Theology from Åbo Akademi University, Finland.
Lindmark’s research is intrinsically interdisciplinary and covers a wide range of topics where his joint interest in education and religion remains a common denominator. Of particular importance is his contributions to the research on popular education, mass schooling, and popular reading in the nineteenth century and the early modern era. A pivotal publication in this field is his monograph “Reading, Writing, and Schooling: Swedish Practices of Education and Literacy, 1650-1880” (2004), where Lindmark provides valuable insights into the origins of the Swedish school system and the reading culture behind Sweden’s comparatively high literacy rates in the early modern era.
A second key contribution concerns the complex issues of colonial encounters, textbook revisions and historical justice, where Lindmark among many other things have done notable work on pietism, colonialism, and schooling in eighteenth-century Sápmi. This research strand featured one of the standout achievements of Lindmark’s career: the white paper project presented in a two-volume edited book, and a popularized version later translated into the edited book “The Sami and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project” (2018). This remarkable collaborative project between representatives of the Sami population, the Church of Sweden and academia, which Lindmark chaired, remains key in the public debate on the position of the Sami in Sweden. In recognition of this impactful research, Lindmark was honored with the Várdduo scientific prize for Sami research in 2022.
Beyond his role as a researcher, Lindmark’s organizational prowess has left an indelible mark. He established his research group History and Education as the premier environment for research in the Nordics, actively promoting the history of education nationally and internationally. His organizational endeavors include hosting the ISCHE conference in 2006, the Nordic conference in history of education in 2012, and the creation of the Nordic Journal of Educational History (first issue in 2014). He has paid particular attention to training new generations of scholars. Apart from recurrent PhD and postdoc workshops, Lindmark chaired the graduate school in Historical Media (2011-14) and played a pivotal role in initiating the National Graduate School in Applied History of Education (2020-25). As a result, Lindmark has repeatedly been described as the main promotor of history of education in the Nordics for the last twenty years. Apart from the many careers he has supported (they are surprisingly many, as evidenced at ISCHE and ECER), he is, without a doubt, one of the main reasons that history of education has flourished in Sweden during the last two decades.
News of the award has been received with significant excitement in the Swedish and Nordic research communities (see, for example https://www.umu.se/nyheter/daniel-lindmark-tilldelas-brittisk-utmarkelse_12007307/).
In responding to the news of this award, Daniel says:
“I am truly honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious award. This unexpected recognition from a key player in the field means very much to me, and I am deeply grateful for the acknowledgment of my work. I am particularly delighted that the nomination has emphasised my efforts to develop a research group at Umeå University in collaboration with national and international partners. This means that the award is also a recognition of the extensive and prominent research carried out by colleagues and doctoral candidates in the Umeå History and Education Research Group. I am totally convinced that this award will contribute to further strengthening the field of history of education at my university and beyond.”
Professor Lindmark has been invited to receive his award in person at the History of Education Society’s Annual Conference in Winchester in November 2025.