Professor of Modern English literature. Research interests: speculative fiction, travel writing, fan fiction, the Arctic.
Teaching and Supervision
I teach predominantly literature at all levels, from undergraduate to postgraduate. At present, I am the main supervisor for PhD candidate Lara Rodríguez Sieweke, and co-supervisor for Solveig Bollig.
Research
In my 2000 dissertation The Second Journey (revised 2010), I focused on contemporary trips in the footsteps of an earlier traveler. The original travelogue works as an explicit map guiding the second traveler not only to a geographical destination but to a perception of authenticity. The form of the second journey draws attention to imitation and repetition: aspects that are commonly played down in travel literature, but descriptions often work to transform places that are already mapped (figuratively and literally) into partly new landscapes. See also “Footsteps” in The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, 2020
Following my dissertation work I was a member of the research project Foreign North and contunied work on travel literature from the long nineteenth century (see publication list). In my ongoing research, I continue examinations of how outsiders’ representations of northern areas in fiction can be tied to and highlight cultural discourses. More specifically, I am interested in how the Arctic functions and changes in speculative fiction: texts that in various ways present events and circumstances that cannot be aligned with the reader's understanding of reality. I examine how specific speculative discourses emerge in relation to the Arctic, and how images of the Arctic change through speculative fiction. Both traditional representations of the Arctic as empty and unfamiliar and contemporary (and future) images of, among other things, climate change are part of the material analysed. The monograph The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction was published by Routledge in 2023.
I have for many years worked with fan fiction:online-published stories starting from already existing fictional worlds. The project FAN(G)S: The vampire in contemporary fan fiction was funded by the Swedish Research Council 2011-2014. Together with my project partner Malin Isaksson I analyzed fan engagement in three contemporary vampire worlds and examined how fanfic authors on the one hand retained strong intertextual links to the source texts on both character- and plot levels, on the other expressed different forms of resistance to it. The project resulted in a large number of articles and anthology chapters (see publication list) and monograph Fanged Fan Fiction was published in 2013. The work with fan fiction has sparked an interest in theoretical and methodological issues connected to paratexts as they appear in digital archives. Key publications here are "The Paratext of Fan Fiction" (2015) and "Paratextual Navigation as a Research Method" (2016).