Pelle Valentin Olsen

Pelle Valentin Olsen is Associate Senior Lecturer in History at Lund University. He is a cultural social, and transnational historian of the modern Middle East. His research focuses on the history of leisure, gender and sexuality, historically inflected media studies, and Jewish life in the modern Middle East. He focuses mainly on twentieth century Iraq, but his work simultaneously explores transnational and global connections beyond the Middle East. He is committed to unearthing the hybrid and pluralist aspects of Middle Eastern history and seek to highlight everyday perspectives and voices left out by traditional historical narratives. 

Pelle received his PhD, with honours, from the University of Chicago in 2020. His dissertation was awarded Best Dissertation on Modern/Medieval Iraq Prize by the Academic Research Institute in Iraq. Prior to joining Lund in May of 2026, he was Associate Professor of Middle East history at the University of Bergen in Norway, a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Oslo, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Global History at Roskilde University in Denmark. He completed an MPhil in Middle East History at St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. 

His research interests converge in the book manuscript in-progress, Idle Days and Nights: Leisure, Entertainment, and Everyday Life in Modern Iraq. Examining Iraqi history through the lens of leisure, it offers entirely novel perspectives on a country whose modern history is often narrated through battles, sectarian conflicts, and failed attempts to create a democratic society. By making room for everyday life and placing experiences and pursuits of entertainment at the centre of its narrative, the book provides an alternative history of Iraq. While Idle Days and Nights traces official discourses, anxieties related to idleness, and attempts to control and discipline leisure, it constantly invites readers to look beyond the Iraqi state. The protagonists of the book include children, students, nightclub performers, teachers, police officers, parents, cinema entrepreneurs, and musicians. The book follows these characters, who belonged to different social and economic classes, as they moved between cafés, cinemas, censorship offices, schools, nightclubs, libraries, and private homes. The book highlights leisure’s centrality to broader discussions on morality, sexuality and gender, and the making of new Iraqi subjects. 

His work has appeared in edited volumes as well as in IJMES, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Social History, Middle East Critique, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, and elsewhere. His research has received support from the Fulbright Commission, the Carlsberg Foundation, the German Orient Institute Beirut, the Danish Institute in Damascus, the Danish Academy in Rome, and others.