Mattias Forshage
Senior Assistant
Contact
Phone: +46 (0)8 5195 4049
E-mail: mattias.forshage@nrm.se
Billing and Mailing Address:
See the Staff and Contacts page.
Education
PhD, Uppsala university, 2009
Responsibilities
The museum holds a large number of type specimens and I am responsible for an ongoing type project across the zoological collections. It concerns acquiring an overview of the richness of type specimens in the collection, and making it publicly available, as well as facilitating the discovery of hitherto undocumented types, and expediting the ongoing databasing of types. In this process, it is important to increase and share the knowledge of the history of the collections (organisational history, staff, expeditions, associated researchers and acquired private collections over time) as well as of the code of zoological nomenclature.
Also, I am responsible for the curating and loans in the Cnidaria + Ctenophora collection. Other collections where I regularly spend some efforts include the dry mollusc collection, the Hymenoptera collection, and the historical entomological collections.
Research interests
I am working with the history of entomology in Sweden, all aspects. Partly this is in order to make old data in literature and in museum collections more available through increasing the knowledge of collectors, collections, labelling practices and label interpretation. But it is also more of an actual history project, investigating the different directions in and conditions for entomological activity at different times, in different social groups, and different parts of the country, with a special interest in the relationship between amateurs and professionals and their respective contributions under different circumstances, as well as the connection between ideas in entomology and other ideas, overall scientific and non-scientific theories. In this line of enquiry other favourite topics will repeatedly be intersected, like philosophy of science, general epistemology, poetry, imagination, social justice, the position of women, implications of deviation and outsidership…
But basically I am a zoological systematist with an unfaltering interest in taxonomy, phylogeny, morphology, evolution, biogeography and faunistics, and my main taxonomic speciality is a poorly known group of parasitic wasps named Figitidae (and especially its most species-rich subfamily, Eucoilinae). But I am involved in projects concerning other groups of Hymenoptera too, as well as Coleoptera, Strepsiptera, and overall insect biodiversity. I have a particular love for dung beetles, and this is an area of interest that immediately spills over into questions of ecology and conservation as well. (I’ll dabble in several other groups of animals too but not necessarily claiming it to be research-level…)
Publications
