Lars Trägårdh is a historian who mostly lived in the US between 1970 och 2010, with periods also in France, Germany and Kenya, while maintaining his personal and professional ties to Sweden. After many years as hippie, café-worker, entrepreneur and businessman in San Francisco, he returned to academic studies in 1986. He received his Ph.D. in history from UC Berkeley in 1993 after living and carrying out research for several years in both Germany and Sweden. He then took up at position teaching Modern European history at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he remained for ten years.

During his years in the US, he also served as a guest professor at the University of Linköping, teaching graduate courses, and he also conducted a research project at Södertörn University College, which resulted in the celebrated book – Är svensken människa? Gemenskap och oberoende i det moderna Sverige (2006, pocket 2009, revised and extended edition 2015, German translation 2016) – co-written with Henrik Berggren. The book was also translated into English in 2022 as The Swedish Theory of Love: Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden (Seattle, University of Washington Press).  

In 2010 he returned to Sweden where served as professor oh history and civil society studies at Ersta Sköndal Bräcke University College between 2010 and 2022, where he focused on projects concerning state/civil society relations, individual right, the juridification of politics, the Nordic model and the Swedish social contract, and a comparative project on children’s rights regimes in Sweden, France, and the United States. Since 2023 he is a visiting professor at Uppsala university where he currently is heading a major research project on social trust and national community that involves a large quantitative survey measuring variation and change in level of social trust and confidence in institutions in local communities across Sweden, as well as historical and comparative analyses that rely on qualitative data. 

Aside from his academic research and writing, he has establishing a role as a public commentator on Swedish and American politics and society, publishing  regularly in Swedish print media and appearing frequently on Swedish radio and TV. Between 2011 and 2013 he was an independent member of the Commission on the Future of Sweden, headed by the then prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.  During 2024 and 2025 he was the chairman of a commission that created a “Cultural Canon for Sweden,” a report that was presented on September.