Research areas

Research interests
My research lies at the intersection of literary studies, postcolonial studies, and the environmental humanities, with a focus on Anthropocene/Capitalocene narratives, contemporary U.S. culture, and the longue durée of capitalist exploitation.

In my published research, I have worked on 20th and 21st century American culture from various perspectives, exploring how literature and other public narratives register forms of socio-environmental violence and injustice – from the traumas of the interwar period to contemporary systemic racism and healthcare inequalities. I have been particularly interested in following the impact of capitalist modernization on marginalized communities and ecosystems in the U.S. and beyond. In my articles on Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (2021) and Proulx’s Barkskins (2020), I discussed the technological and cultural development of multinational capitalism in North America through the example of transportation infrastructure and the timber industry, and their exploitation of both natural resources and people of color.

In my doctoral dissertation, I chose a wider, world-ecological perspective to compare histories of resource extraction in North America and Southern Africa. By updating recent applications of world-system theory to literary studies, I analyzed various novels that critically respond to the devastating impact of fracking in Pennsylvania, deep water drilling in Angola, large scale deforestation in Canada, and water mega-projects in Zambia. Through an analysis of both narrative strategies and energy histories, I showed the persistence of colonial capitalist myths in our contemporary energy systems and their role in preventing a just transition to renewables. As I argued in my chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology (2023), where I look at representations of eco-crimes in Nordic tv shows, new energies can only reproduce old forms of injustice when they are exploited to power global capitalism.

Current project
My work on the cultural and political dimension of the ecological crisis has developed with my current postdoc in the DFF project “Addressing Climate Anxiety Using Flash Fiction in the Classroom” (PI: Bryan Yazell). By intersecting liteary studies and participatory science, I am analyzing more than 250 short stories written by Danish high-school students to access young people’s ideas about the future and the climate through their socio-political imaginaries.