Research Interests

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.

Curriculum

2014 - Professor of European Literature, Department for the Study of Culture, SDU

2020 - Manager (2022-23 with Dr Emily Hogg) of the Center for Uses of Literature

2009-2014 Associate Professor of English Language Literature, HUM, SDU

2016-2022 Head of the Research Group in Uses of Art and Literature

2011-2016 Head of the research programme in Welfare Narratives, ILKM, SDU

2011-2020 Member of the PhD Board for the Humanities, SDU

2007-2009 Assistant Professor, ILKM, SDU

2004-2007 Post Doc, Carlsberg Research Fellow (Third Generation Romantic Poetry)

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

2003-2004 Reader, English Department, University of Copenhagen

2000 Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University, USA

2003 PhD degree awarded, University of Copenhagen (dissertation on William Wordsworth directed by professor Charls Lock)

1999-2002 Graduate studies, English Department, University of Copenhagen

1995-1996 exchange student, Ohio University, USA

1992-1998 English and Comparative Literature, University of Odense

1972 Born