Prior to her work at SUM, she taught comparative cultural history at the National University of Ireland in Galway (1995–7) and the European University in Florence (1997–9). She held fellowships at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Uppsala (1993), Robinson College, University of Cambridge (1995) and Mansfield College, University of Oxford (2001), and a visiting professorship at Stanford University (2010). Her latest publications include Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond (Routledge 2018) and The Origins of Anti-Authoritarianism (Routledge 2019). In 2005 she was ranked by the Norwegian daily Dagbladet as one of the ten most influential intellectuals in Norway. She is a recipient of the prestigious Freedom of Expression Award for introducing Eastern European perspectives to the public debate in Scandinavia.

Nina Witoszek is also a fiction writer (under the pen name Nina FitzPatrick). She is best known for an infamous collection of short stories, Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia (1991; Penguin 2003), which won the Irish Times–Aer Lingus Award for fiction in 1991. (The prize was subsequently withdrawn when she could not prove Irish ancestry.) Witoszek’s other fictional work – written with Pat Sheeran – includes The Loves of Faustyna (Penguin 1995) and Daimons (2003), as well as several film scripts and a libretto to the operetta Operation Opera (2011). She is also the author of a series of documentary films about iconic Norwegian heroes and thinkers, such as Fridtjof Nansen, Arne Naess and Thor Heyerdahl.