Presentation
Ph.D. in English Studies
Research: literature and culture, intermedia storytelling, adaption, performance, participatory culture/art, interactive cultural practices, live action role playing,
Teaching: English, intermedia storytelling Cultural Studies.
Research project: Embodied participatory forms of storytelling
I am working on a project with Sara Bjärstorp where we study different forms of participatory, interactive, transmedial storytelling. Our focus is primarily on how literature is used in various arenas, some of which are seldom recognised or studied. Our primary focus is on larps (live action role playing) where participants create a story together in physical space. We study the ways in which participants use their body and how they interact with each other and their physical surrounding in order to tell a story together. Since larp is a cultural form that has no audience, only participants, we can only study larps by participating. This means that we also actively problematize the different roles that being a participant and scholar implies. Larps that we have focused on so far are Gertrude, a prequel larp based upon Hamlet, and Fortune & Felicity, a larp based upon all of Jane Austen’s works. These provide a rich material on different aspects on storytelling, intermedia storytelling/adaptation, performance, gaming, embodiment, gender and class.
Earlier research: American Drama and the Production of Voice
My earlier research deals with voice in American drama and what happens to the highly ideologized voice when the textual drama is transferred to the visual film-medium. I this research I study dramas such as The Crucible, Strange Interlude, The Women, Glengarry Glenn Ross, The Dutchman and For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide.
Dissertation: Language, Subject, Ideology: The Politics of Representation in Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Djuna Bernes’s Nightwood and Gertude Stein’s Lurch Church Amiably.
In my dissertation I researched the idea of political literature, and how three modernists—Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein—used literary, narrative and aesthetic means to politicize literature. Underlying their avant-garde practices was a belief in linguistic innovation as a road towards political change.
