I am an Associate Professor in English literature at the Department of Language Studies. I teach courses in literature, cultural studies and academic writing at all levels.
Research Interests
My research encompasses several areas within literary and cultural studies, including exploration of the narrative poetics of identity formation, how meaning is created via intertextuality or adaptation, the creation of fictional storyworlds and the conventions and tendencies of genre fictions (e.g. Gothic and science fiction) in various media forms. Most of my research has maintained a focus on speculative narratives of various kinds, examining how these conceive of relationships between humans and nonhumans (or more-than-human entanglements), and considering how such relationships are underpinned by particular ways of understanding the world. I am a founding member of the Speculative Fiction UmU research group at Umeå University and a member of the Swedish Network for Speculative Fiction Research.
Previous Research
I investigate audience strategies and narrative patterns in different genres and media such as horror roleplaying games in "Playing with the Mythos" (2007). In my doctoral dissertation I took a similar approach but with greater focus on the Gothic. My work in the Gothic engages with the genre’s ability to reveal, through what is threatened or destabilized for characters, the beliefs, epistemological bases or ‘truths’ that are assumed to be foundational to normative conceptions of individual self, and more broadly society, in relation to an ‘other.’ In The Gothic in Contemporary Interactive Fictions (2010), I examine ways that poetics of literary Gothic conventions, tropes and elements are reinvented in four 21st-century, wholly text-based interactive fictions, in part via comparative analyses of intertexts by Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft. Key findings include description of the digital poetics of Gothic conventions and illumination of the many ways epistemological conceptions inform perceptions of self and other. I explore such conceptions to a greater extent in the anthology chapter “Epistemological Rupture and the Gothic Sublime in Slouching Towards Bedlam” (2012).
My research in science fiction engages with similar aspects; questions of self versus other in relation to the conceptual affordances of material and social environments. In two articles about the television series Battlestar Galactica (broadcast 2003-2009), I investigate the narrative’s involved, central thematic concern with the ‘essence’ of humanity. In “Utopia, Relationality and Ecology: Resurrecting the Natural in Battlestar Galactica” (2012), I trace the problematic assumptions about what is ‘natural’ about humanity, while in “Making Starbuck Monstrous: The Poetics of Othering in Battlestar Galactica” (2014) I explore the gendered, social constructions that enable othering.
The relationship between environments—material or social, real or imagined—and ways of thinking or being in the world are explored via conceptions of character and reader storyworld construction in “The Developing Storyworld of H. P. Lovecraft” (2014) and “Fragmented Fiction: Storyworld Construction and the Quest for Meaning in Justin Cronin’s The Passage” (2017). The former argues that Lovecraft’s work—stories usually featuring human characters who encounter beings or entities whose existence shatters their worldviews—takes on cultural capital via readers’ desire for further storyworld development. The latter, co-authored with Maria Lindgren Leavenworth, investigates how the novel’s narrative structure encourages readers to imagine and develop the storyworld in parallel to characters’ attempts to re-envision the post-apocalyptic environment in relation to a time before the apocalypse.
In "Human-Other Entanglements in Speculative Future Arctics” (2022), Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and I examine how speculative climate fiction, generated by real-world anxieties and aspirations, imaginatively and productively explores the effects of accelerated climate change. Employing theoretical concepts asserting entanglements between humans and others in the more-than-human environment, we analyze Laline Paull’s The Ice, Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, and Vicki Jarrett’s Always North, three novels that engage with climate change and its effects in the Arctic. Entanglements find different forms depending on the level of speculation in the works examined, but they all demonstrate the detrimental centrality of the human in past and future paradigms.