Research areas

I'm a phenomenologist gone rogue working with qualitative and quantitative investigations to understand all kinds of dimensions of the mind and body of artists and experts. 

I began my research career in 2012 as a PhD student at the Center for Subjectivity Research trying to understand what it is that happens to artists when they claim to have intense absorbed experiences where they loose all sense of time, place and themselves. To do so I started to combine ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with traditional phenomenology (such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), modern phenomenological research and cognitive science (such as Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi and Dorothee Legrand) and psychology of music. I started interviewing and touring with The Danish String Quartet and have been working with these guys ever since. In 2019 I published a book,  "A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption", about all of this.

Since then, I've done post doctoral work at the Interacting Minds Centre, University of Århus, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, and RITMO, University of Oslo. I've kept trying to find out how art influences us and have expanded this investigation to also include physiological measures of musical absorption such as eyetracking, motion capture, and heart rate synchronization. You can see a recent experiment on "slow TV" here (go to 3.32.00). All of this is working toward a grand science concert with researchers from all over Europe, a full concerthall (Knock on Corona-wood!) and the Danish String Quartet. 

I'm now associate professor here at SDU. I continue to work on phenomenology and qualitative research, and mixed methods. This will have application for understanding arts, sports activities and health related research. From 2021 onwards I hope to go into music therapy.

Get in touch if any of this sounds interesting