Mariah Larsson

I received my Ph D from Lund University in 2006, with a dissertation on film director Mai Zetterling and the 1960s in Sweden. Since then, I have mainly combined the research fields film and sexuality. I started working at Linnaeus University in 2016, after previous employments at Malmö University and Stockholm University.

Teaching

I teach all levels of film studies.

Research

My main area of research is film and sexuality, which includes the history of pornographic film in Sweden, but also issues such as film censorship and obscenity law, gender and popular culture, and national and transnational cinema. Recently, I have been working on a project about Fräcka fredag (SVT, 1988), a sexual edutainment television program, but also on Mai Zetterling and on Nordic cinema more generally. Among my most recent publications are A Cinema of Obsession: The Life and Work of Mai Zetterling (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), Såra tukt och sedlighet: Hundra år av pornografi i Sverige (co-authored with Klara Arnberg, Tommy Gustafsson and Elisabet Björklund, Natur och kultur, 2021) and The Intellect Handbook of Nordic Cinema (co-edited with Gunnar Iversen, 2026). 

The project about Fräcka fredag explores how “good” pornography was constructed in the Swedish social discourse in the late 1980s and what this reveals about the sexual ideology in Sweden at this point in time, with the television show Fräcka fredag, broadcast in the spring of 1988, as a point of departure and focus.

Commissions

Co-coordinator of the Centre for Studies in Popular Culture

Member of the Council for Good Research Practice