Andreas Önnerfors

Andreas Önnerfors was born in 1971 in Germany in Swedish-German family of academics. Enjoying a bilingual upbringing, he early became interested in literature and writing.

He left German secondary school (Abitur) in the city of Trier, formerly part of the Roman empire and birth-town of Karl Marx. A keen traveller, Önnerfors spent almost two years on the move before joining the Swedish army in Stockholm. Studies in Russian were followed by the History of Sciences and Ideas. It was here his passion for the eighteenth century and particularly freemasonry was born. At Lund university, Sweden, he wrote his dissertation on Swedish Pomerania 1720-1815, a zone of cultural contacts and identifications between enlightenment and romanticism. After post-doctoral stays in Germany and France, Önnerfors worked as Director of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Returning to Sweden in 2010, Önnerfors has since worked at the Universities of Malmö and Lund and is now an Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.