Education
Witt-Brattström completed her Doctor of Philosophy with a dissertation on the Swedish author Moa Martinson (Moa Martinson: skrift och drift i trettiotalet) at Stockholm University in 1988.
Witt-Brattström completed her Doctor of Philosophy with a dissertation on the Swedish author Moa Martinson (Moa Martinson: skrift och drift i trettiotalet) at Stockholm University in 1988.
She is Professor of Literature and head of department at Södertörn University outside Stockholm, and a well-known feminist. She has since written a number of texts on Saint Bridget of Sweden, Victoria Benedictsson and Edith Södergran (among others). She also translated the novel Egalia"s Daughters by Gerd Brantenberg into Swedish.
In 2010 she published a history of the feminist movement in Sweden, "Å alla kära systrar (Foreign all dear sisters).
Witt-Brattström is the Dag-Hammarskjöld-Visiting Professor at the Department for Northern European Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin since the fall term of 2008. She is currently Professor of Nordic Literature at Helsinki University, as of 2012.
Between 1989 and 2014 Ebba Witt-Brattström was married to Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. They have three sons.
Ebba also has an older son from an earlier marriage.
Her father was a German anti-Nazi from a relatively affluent family, while her mother was an Estonian from a poor peasant"s family. Her parents divorced early, and she grew up with her mother.
In the 1970s she was a member of the feminist organisation Grupp 8, and in 2005 she was one of the founders of the feminist political organisation and party Feministiskt Initiativ, although she later distanced herself from the organisation and criticized its alleged strong left-wing tendencies.