Menstrual Studies in Scandinavia

MeSS is a multidisciplinary network of menstrual cycle researchers active in Scandinavia. We work to strengthen research and knowledge in the region and foster opportunities for cooperation and knowledge sharing. We combine scholarship from the humanities, social studies, and medical studies.

Read our latest publication here: Andreasen, L.U., Søndergaard, M.K., Røstvik, C.M., Persdotter, J., Ghanoui, S.L. and Frisk, M., 2023. Exploring Critical Menstrual Studies in the Nordic Countries: The Importance of Local Specificities. Nursing Clio.

Our team

Camilla Mørk Røstvik is Associate Professor in History. She specialises in 20th and 21st cultural histories, with a longstanding research interest in the history, cultures, and art of menstruation. Camilla is Honorary Lecturer in the School of Medicine and the School of Art History at Aberdeen, and Honorary Research Fellow in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She is the lead of the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Menstruation Research Network UK’.

Saniya Lee Ghanoui is a historian and digital humanist of 19th and 20th century United States and Europe. She examines the intersections of gender and sexuality, medicine, and media with an emphasis on transnational history. Her current book project is a cultural history of sex and menstrual education in the U.S. and Sweden. She is the Senior Producer for the podcast Sexing History and a Board Member of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research.

Mie Kusk Søndergaard is a PhD fellow at Department of Public Health – General Practice, University of Southern Denmark, and holds a MSc in Medical Anthropology from Aarhus University. Søndergaard is currently researching healthcare seeking for and diagnostic work around gynecological disturbances in Denmark, focusing on 40- to 65-year-olds. She has previously researched healthcare seeking for menstrual problems among adolescent Danish women, and diagnostic delay for endometriosis in Denmark. Her interests include embodied experiences, healthcare seeking, diagnostic encounters, contraceptive technologies, and how gender and sexuality emerge in the healthcare system.

Matleena Frisk is a consumption historian and an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher based at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki. She has a background in Economic and Social History. Her current project concentrates on short lifespan and disposable products and how they revolutionized everyday life in the 20^th century. She has also studied disposable menstrual products in her doctoral dissertation (2019). At large, her research has focused on the relationship of consumption, norms, and sociocultural changes.

Lise Ulrik Andreasen is an educational anthropologist and author of The Possibilities of Leaky Bodies. A Feminist Materialist Ethnography of Menstruating Youth. Andreasen’s research within the field of critical menstruation studies has explored menstruation as a socio-material phenomena in the context of children and youth. Andreasen’s research is situated in the intersection of ethnography, feminist new materialism and STS and besides menstruation her research interests are the body, gender and sexuality, race, class, pedagogies, post qualitative inquiry and arts-based research practices. Andreasen is based in Copenhagen, Denmark where she lives with her partner and two children.

Josefin Persdotter is a sociologist with focus on STS and gendered technologies. She has explored how menstruation is made into a matter of dirt and pollution, the normativities surrounding menstruation, and currently explore how menopause is taken into consideration in the workplace. Thereto, Persdotter is active as a menstrual artist and co-founded Sweden’s leading menstrual advocacy and education organization MENSEN – forum for menstruation.

Read more about our Publications & Projects here.

At the moment we do not have any planned open activities. Stay tuned for what’s to come!

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