Research areas

I do research in American literature and culture, primarily in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. More broadly speaking I am interested in speculative fiction (especially gothic, science fiction and clifi), travel writing, nature writing and ecocriticism.

I am invested in examining how speculative and irrealist genres can be employed to address contemporary questions and crises. In this, I am especially interested in the correlation between imagined futures regarding technology (robots, AI, space travel), environment and disasters shape the politics of the present.

Further, I have for over two decades examined how human interaction or the lack thereof have shaped landscapes and urbanscapes. In this, I have been particularly interested in the two extremes, doing work on wastelands (the desert, the arctic, the sea, space) and the metropolis. I have investigated how the wasteland and the metropolis are represented both in documentarist versions in literature, film and games, as well as of how wasteland and the metropolis merge in the postapocalyptic hybrid of the two in cityscapes made derelict by environmental or financial collapse, pandemics, meteor strikes, or nuclear warfare.

I am currently working on two major projects, one on 'Planetary and Political Grotesque' and another on 'Writing Travel in the Twentyfirst Century: Mobility and Authenticity in the Planetary Emergency' (2025-2029), funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. I am also presently part of the research project Cultures of the Polycrisis (2025-2027, Linnaeus University).

Prior to this I have been the recipient of a research grant funded by the Carlsberg Foundation for the project Future Desert: Wasteland Imaginaries of the Anthropocene (2020-2021), as well as co-PI on the research project Nostalgia in Contemporart European Culture, funded by The Joint Comittee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2016-2018).