Rasmus Vangshardt

Academic CV

• 2019 | Visiting Scholar, Romanisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg
• 2018 | Visiting Scholar, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York
• 2018 | PhD Fellow, Centre for Medieval Literature, University of Southern Denmark
• 2016 | Teaching Assistant, Comparative literature, University of Southern Denmark
• 2016 | Master in Comparative Literature, University of Copenhagen
• 2014 | Exchange Student, Freie Universität Berlin
• 2013 | Exchange Student, Universität Mannheim
• 2011 | Bachelor in Philosophy, University of Copenhagen

Affiliated academic projects

• Historicity Research Group, University of Southern Denmark. Leader: Dr.phil. Sofie Kluge.

Publications

• Rasmus Vangshardt, Livets febrile hemmeligheder. Et litterært slægtskab mellem Henrik Pontoppidan og Thomas Mann (Hellerup: Spring 2017) [The Feverish Secrets of Live. A Literary Kinship Between Henrik Pontoppidan and Thomas Mann]
• "Antonio's Sadness in the Stoic Theatrum Mundi of the Early Modern City" in Orbis Litterarum (2019). Vol. 74, no. 4, p. 264-277.

• For further articles and more, see the publications list or my orcid-id.

• Literary historiography
• Medievalisms from the Early Modern Period to the Second World War.
• Danish literary history
• Theory of Comparative Literature
• William Shakespeare
• Danish and German romanticism

Ph.D. Fellow at The Centre for Medieval Literature, SDU.

Ph.D. Project

The medievalisms of the world theatre from Calderón to Hofmannsthal. An alternative current in literary modernity

The project follows a tradition of the use of the world theatre topos in literary modernity from Pedro Calderón through to Hugo von Hofmannsthal. With the German romanticists as mediator, a causal chain can be identified through literary history where the mentioned authors invoke the trope of the theatrum mundi. The thesis is that this is due to the attempt to revive medieval dramatic genre and tradition.

The dissertation will therefore consist of an interpretation of plays from the selected authors in order to study medievalisms of genre and the related use of the premodern world theatre topos. It will do so through the discipline of comparative literature.

The perspective of the dissertation is the identification of an alternative current in literary modernity. When most literary histories are written on the assumption that modernity is based on a rejection of the Middle Ages as ‘the wholly other’ of the same modernity, an identification of positive or constructive tradition of medievalisms at the heart of European dramatic canon problematizes such a macro-narrative of an absolute difference between the medieval and the modern.

Other research interests

Negotiating between the Antique, the Middle Ages and Modernity in Shakespeare

Northen European 20th century literature and its heterogenous modernity in Tom Kristensen, Martin A. Hansen and Thomas Mann.

German-Danish inspirations. See my book The Feverish Secrets of Life. A Literary Kinship Between Henrik Pontoppidan and Thomas Mann (in Danish)