Anna Blennow is an associated professor of Latin at the University of Gothenburg. She is also a renowned essayist and literary critic in Swedish daily press and radio.

Her recent research includes studies on the history of the guidebook with a special focus on the city of Rome, and on this topic, she led an interdisciplinary project at the Swedish Institute in Rome where scholars from various disciplines traced the origin and development of the guidebook from the Middle Ages and up to our time. The project results were published in ‘Rome and the Guidebook Tradition from the Middle Ages to the 20th century’ (De Gruyter 2019). Blennow is also the author of a popular-science guidebook to medieval Rome, ‘Guide till det medeltida Rom’ (Appell förlag 2020).

Blennow is currently affiliated to a prestigious eight-year research program funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, ‘Modes of Modification – Variance and Change in Medieval Manuscript Culture’, where she investigates how literacy and literate culture evolved in the Nordic region with the arrival of the Latin language and the Latin alphabet in the Middle Ages.

She was awarded the Lagergren Prize (Lagergrenska priset) in 2017 for “significant contributions in raising interest for studies in the Humanities focused on Rome and Italy.”