After living abroad for nearly twenty years—primarily in the United States, but also for extended periods in France and Kenya, as well as traveling in many other countries—Lars Trägårdh turned his gaze back to his old homeland, Sweden. The more he reflected on Sweden, the stranger it appeared to him. What had seemed normal in his youth had now become denaturalized. He had lost his cultural innocence.

At this time, he was working with his own company, Synthetic Video, which he had founded with partners in 1982 and which specialized in three-dimensional computer-animated films and “special effects” produced for companies and organizations such as NASA, Ford Aerospace, and Lockheed. When he decided to take a break from his life as an entrepreneur, his renewed interest in Sweden led him to return to academia. Since he was already living in San Francisco, it was natural for him to head across the Bay Bridge to University of California, Berkeley. There, in 1986, he began his doctoral studies in modern European history.

In his 1993 dissertation—The Concept of the People and the Construction of Popular Political Culture in Sweden and Germany, 1800–1933—the focus was on the concept of “the people” in Swedish and German political language. Theoretically, he drew on the ideas of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck about conceptual history, while empirically he centered in particular on the question of the nation and nationalism—examining similarities and differences between the Swedish Social Democrats’ vision of a folkhem (people’s home) and the German Nazis’ idea of Volksgemeinschaft.

Following his dissertation, and in his new position at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City, he continued to write on this theme in a number of additional articles and book chapters. Among other things, he expanded his analysis to include Sweden’s particular relationship to the European Union, which he argued was shaped by an attitude he termed “welfare state nationalism.” During this period, he both researched and taught theories of the nation, the history of nationalism, and the historical roots of the European welfare state, while also writing on these topics in Swedish media.