Heidi Hansson

I am Deputy Vice-Chancellor of education on first and second cycle level, and I have responsibility for equal opportunities. My role also includes third-stream activities and internationalisation of education.

Biography:
I am professor of English literature at the Department of Language Studies.

I am member of the board of the Arctic Research Centre at Umeå University (ARCUM), and member of several international scholarly networks within Arctic studies and Irish literary studies.

I am chairperson of the Strategic Council for Education (USSR), the Strategic Council for Equal Opportunities and the Language Council at Umeå University.

Research:
My research has for instance concerned postmodern literature, Irish women's literature in the nineteenth century and Irish book history.

Between 2002 and 2009, I led the interdisciplinary research programme Foreign North: Outside Perspectives on the Nordic North revolving around arts and literature about and from the Nordic region. A part of my research in this field concerns gendered visions and accounts of the North in fiction and travel literature.

I have also investigated representations of the Arctic and polar exploration in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comic periodicals. Currently, I am working on an edited collection of Arctic literature for children and young adults.

I am also developing a research project about the forms of fiction in nineteenth-century intellectual periodicals. Another strand in my research can be located on the border of language and literature, for instance studies of gendered metaphors and discourse analysis in a wider sense. I am interested in the relations between text and landscape, and have used eco-critical perspectives to understand phenomena in both fiction and non-fiction. In conjunction with that, I am in the process of developing a project on cultural perspectives on mining.

Academic merits:
Professor of English focusing on literature, Umeå University (2007)
Degree of Doctor of Arts in English (1998)

Managerial merits:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Umeå University (2016– )
Acting Head of Department and Head of Department, Department of Language Studies, Umeå University (2014)
Deputy Head of Department, Department of Language Studies, Umeå University (parts of 2008; 2009—2014)