Forskningsinteresser

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My overall research interest is to investigate how literature, in a very broad and inclusive sense, interacts with and may work to shape the world through various acts of reading, in a shifting sense that includes so-called ordinary readers’s work with texts, either alone or collectively. My main ambition is to understand this meeting better and I am working to develop ways to account for it drawing on an interdisciplinary methodological framework that includes empirical methods.

My specific research interests are:

• Literary gerontology and ageing studies, especially novels about the process of growing older interest me (on topics such as retirement and menopause) and lyric poetry where I have written on ‘lyric gerontology’
• Literature’s relations to the welfare state both in Denmark and the UK, focus both on representations of life as an older person and on life as a member of the ‘precariat’ and of experience of ‘precarization’
• Literature and health within Health Humanitis and Narrative Medicine focusing on the effects of different forms of shared reading on e.g. men’s well-being as they transition into retirement or people living with dementia as either patient, relative or caregiver
• Romanticism in British literature and culture with a focus on Wordsworth, ekphrasis, book culture and media studies as well as the so-called third generation of poets (Landon, Hemans, Praed, Hood and others)

I am open to sharing and developing projects on these and other topics.

CV

2014 - Professor i europæisk litteratur, IKS, SDU

2020 - Leder (2022-2023 med Dr Emily Hogg) af Center for Uses of Literature

2020 -. Studieleder Engelsk, HUM, SDU

2009-2014 Lektor i engelsksproget litteratur, HUM, SDU

2016-2022 Leder af forskningsgruppen Uses of Art and Literature

2011-2016 Leder af forskningsprogrammet, Velfærdsfortællinger, IKV

2011-2020 Medlem af Ph.d.-udvalget

2010 Vikarierende leder af FUP-programmet, HCAF, Det Humanistiske Fakultet, SDU

2009-2011 Frikøbt af VELUX fonden til projekt om litteratur, alderdom og velfærdssamfund i regi af ILKM forskningsprogrammet Velfærdsfortællinger v professor Anne-Marie Mai

2008-2009 Videnskabelig assistent, ILKM, SDU

2007-2008 Adjunkt, ILKM, SDU

2007-2008 Adjunktpædagogikum, SDU
2004-2007 Forskningsadjunkt (post.doc.) på projekt om den engelske romantiks tredje generation af digtere finansieret af Carlsbergfonden, ILKM, SDU

2004 Visiting Scholar, State University of New York, Stony Brook, New York

2003-2004 Ekstern lektor, Engelsk Institut, Københavns Universitet

2002-2004 Undervisningsassistent, Center for Engelsk, SDU

2000 Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University, USA

1999-2002 Ph.D.-stipendiat, Engelsk Institut, Københavns Universitet

1995-1996 Ohio University, USA

1992-1998 Engelsk og Litteraturvidenskab, Odense Universitet

1972 Født i Hejls