Group members ¦ Affiliated Scholars ¦ Former members of the group

¦ DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS DEFENCES¦ LICENTIATE THESES DEFENCES¦ VISITING FACULTY EXAMINERS¦ VISITING LECTURERS¦ CURRENT RESEARCH ¦ DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS IN PROGRESS

THE HUMANITIES' RESEARCH GROUP AT BTH

The group’s research covers a broad field that spans from subject-specific research to research within “humanities computing.” The following areas of research can be distinguished:

American and Postcolonial Literary Studies
(Donovan, Fjellestad, Gatzouras, Nygren, Pettersson) 

                 
Twentieth-century literature, literary theory, and poetics
(Engberg, Fjellestad, Forssberg Malm, Forsgren, Lindhé)

Interactions between Contemporary Literature and Technology 
(Engberg, Fjellestad, Lindhé)

Modernism, popular culture, and the new technologies
(Donovan, Forsgren, Forssberg Malm) 

Creating the  (Literary) Web
(Davis, Donovan, Fjellestad, Jendland, Nilsson)

Technology’s Structuring of the Social and the Cultural  
(Bergman, Millbourn, Sjölander, Stranne )

The group consists of four subjects: English, Comparative Literature, Swedish, and History. (This latter subject was reassigned to the group in January 2004.)

The Head of the group’s research activities is Professor Danuta Fjellestad.

 

Group members

Kalle Bergman
Lecturer in History, at BTH since 1999.Fil. dr. 2002, Lund University; doc. diss.: “Makt Möten Gränser, Skånska kommissionen 1669-70.”

Main research interests: Integration, identity, political culture, borders, historical rooms, city, region, nation

 

Michael Davis
Lecturer in English, at BTH since 1995.
Ph. D. 1996, University of Austin, Texas; doc. diss.: “The Discourse of Oratory: The New Rhetoric and Romantic Writing in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain.”

Main research interests: Rhetoric, computer-assisted learning, web design, electronic text development

 

Stephen Donovan
Research Fellow, at BTH since 2002.
Fil. dr. 2001, Göteborg University; doc. diss.: “Literary Modernism and the Press, 1870-1922.”

Main research interests: Anglo-American literary modernism, nineteenth and early twentieth century media history, imperial culture, literary theory, R.L Stevenson, Joseph Conrad

 

Maria Engberg
Doctoral Candidate in English Literature at BTH/Uppsala University since 2002. Doc. diss. in progress: “The Aesthetics and Poetics of Digital Poetry.”

Main research interests: Modern and postmodern poetry and poetics, experimental and avantgarde art and writing, media studies and theory, visual studies

 

Danuta Fjellestad
Professor of English, at BTH since 1999.
Fil. dr. 1986, Stockholm University; doc. diss.: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Gravity’s Rainbow: A Study in Duplex Fiction; docent 1995 Uppsala University.

Main research interests: Modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, postcolonial studies, multimedia narratives

 

Peter Forsgren
Lecturer in Comparative Literature, at BTH since 1997.
Fil. dr. 1992, Göteborg University; doc. diss.: “Att lyssna med ögat: Studier i Peder Sjögrens 1940-talsromaner.”

Main research interests: Prose, narrative studies, gender, modernity

 

Anna Forssberg Malm
Lecturer in Comparative Literature, at BTH since 2000.
Fil. dr. 1998, Göteborg University; doc. diss.: “Kollisioner: Aksel Sandemose som outcast och monument.”

Main research interests: Narrative theories and prose analysis in modernism, postmodernism, new media

 

Vicky J. Gatzouras
Junior lecturer in English literature. Doc. diss.: “Family Matters in Greek American Literature.” (2007)

Main research interests: Ethnic writings, Greek-American literature, ethnic and gendered identity formation, family ethnicity, cultural studies

 

Lissa Holloway-Attaway
Project Leader for Literature, Culture and Digital Media program, at BTH since February 2005.
Ph. D. 2000, University of Georgia; doc. diss.: “Mother, Matter, Molecule: A Hyper(re)mediated Exploration of Female Identity in Selected Works by Edgar Allen Poe” (Multimedia CD-ROM).

Main research interests: Digital media, science, technology, and gender studies; cultural studies; electronic pedagogy

 

Annacarin Jendland
Junior Lecturer in Swedish, at BTH since 2001.

Main research interests: Sociolinguistics, use of English in business communication

 

Cecilia Lindhé
Doctoral Candidate in Comparative Literature at BTH/Uppsala University since 2002. Doc. diss. in progress: “Från stad till cyberrymd-från gudinna till cyborg. Intermedialitet och estetik i Kerstin Ekmans författarskap.”

Main research interests: Kerstin Ekman, modernist aesthetics, intermediality, media, literature and technology, gender theory, Jeanette Winterson

 

Ingrid Millbourn
Lecturer in History, at BTH since 1999.
Fil. dr. 1990, Lund University; doc. diss.: “Rätt till maklighet: om den svenska socialdemokratins lärprocess 1895-1902.”; docent 1991 Lund University.

Main research interests: Interaction, identification, utopia, cartells, consumption, welfare, psychoanalysis, power, class, gender

 

Ingrid Nilsson
Doctoral Candidate in English Linguistics at BTH/Lund University since 2002. Doc. diss. in progress: “Translation: the Effects of Language Specific Characteristics on Strategies and Processing.”

Main research interests: Cognitive and psycho-linguistics: expressions of spatiality, transnational strategies, cognitive processes in bilinguals, corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, pedagogic influences on man-computer interaction in computer assisted teaching

 

Åse Nygren
Junior lecturer in English. Doc. diss.: “Tracing Trauma: The Narration of Suffering in Sherman Alexie’s Prose Fiction.” (2007)

Main research interests: American Indian Literature, trauma, suffering, the comic, iconic representations, popular culture, psychoanalysis, storytelling

 

Inger Pettersson
Doctoral Candidate in English Literature at BTH/Göteborg University since 1998. Doc. diss. in progress: ”An Invitation to Latinidad: Figures of Trauma, Testimony, and Translation in U.S Latina Fiction.”

Main research interests: U.S Latina Literature, Latinidad, Latinization of U.S and Swedish popular culture, tropicalisation, cultural studies, feminist theory

 

Jonas Sjölander
Researcher in History at BTH/Växjö University since 2001.
Fil. dr. 2006; doc. diss.: “Solidaritetens omvägar. Facklig internationalism i den tredje industriella revolutionen- Metall i Colombia 1976 till 1986.” (2005)

Main research interests: History of working life, internationalism and the internationalisation of the third industrial revolution, world system theory, postcolonial perspectives

 

Staffan Stranne
Researcher in History, at BTH since 1999.
Fil. dr. 2004, Växjö University; doc. diss.: “Produktion och arbete i den tredje industriella revolutionen: Tarkett i Ronneby 1970-2000.”

Main research interests: Industrial development, social change, the third industrial revolution, technology as a factor in social structure

 

 

Affiliated Scholars

 

Jay D. Bolter
Honorary doctor, at BTH since 2004
Ph. D. 1977, University of North Carolina

Main research interests: Augmented Reality and dramatic experiences, digital art and design, media theory

 

Staffan Klintborg
Guest Professor in English Linguistics, at BTH since 2003.
Fil. dr. 1999,  Lund University; doc. diss.: “The Transience of American Swedish.”

Main research interests: American Swedish, text linguistics, narrative fiction, poetry translations

 

Johan Svedjedal
Guest Professor in Comparative Literature, at BTH since 2003.
Ph. D.  1987, Uppsala University; doc. diss: “Almqvist-berättaren på bokmarknaden: berättartekniska och litteratursociologiska studier i C.J.L Almqvists prosafiktion kring 1840.”

Main research interests: Sociology of literature, hypertext history, theory, and aesthetics, IT and literature, C.J.L. Almqvist

 

Former members of the group

 

Jessica Enevold
Doctoral Candidate in English Literature at BTH/Göteborg University 1999-2003. Fil. dr. 2003; doc. diss.: “Women on the Road: Regendering Narratives of Mobility.”

 

Jonas Ingvarsson
Junior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, at BTH 2002-2003. Fil.dr. 2003, Göteborg University; doc.diss.: En Besynnerlig Gemenskap: Teknologins Gestalter i Svensk Prosa 1965-70.

 

Katarina Lundin Åkesson
Lecturer in Swedish at BTH 2003-2004. Fil. dr. 2003 Lund University; doc. diss.:  “Small Clauses in Swedish: Towards a Unified Account.”

 

Jane Mattisson
Lecturer in English Literature at BTH 1993-2004. Fil. dr. 2000 Lund University; doc. diss.: “Knowledge and Survival in the Novels of Thomas Hardy.”

 

Per Sivefors
Doctoral Candidate in English at BTH/Göteborg University 1999 – 2004. Fil. dr. 2004; doc. diss.: “The Delegitimised Vernacular: Language Politics, Poetics and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe.”

 

Jakob Winnberg
Doctoral Candidate in English at BTH/Göteborg University 1999 -2001. Fil. dr. 2001; doc. diss.: “An Aesthetics of Vulnerability: The Sentimentum and the Novels of Graham Swift.”

 

Håkan Åbrink
Lecturer in Swedish at BTH 2001-2003. Fil. dr. 1998, Tammerfors University; doc. diss.: “Gomorron, Stockholm: radioprat som stil, genre och samtal med lyssnaren.”

 

DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS DEFENCES

 

Staffan Stranne

“Produktion och arbete i den tredje industriella revolutionen. Tarkett i Ronneby 1970-2000” (May 19, 2004)

 

Jonas Sjölander

“Solidaritetens omvägar. Facklig internationalism i den tredje industriella revolutionen - Metall i Colombia 1976 till 1986” (Nov 2005)

 

Per Sivefors

“The Delegitimised Vernacular: Language Politics, Poetics and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe” (March 20, 2004)

 

Jessica Enevold

“Women on the Road: Regendering Narratives of Mobility” (October 18, 2003)

 

Kalle Bergman

“Makt, möten, gränser. Skånska kommissionen i Blekinge 1669-70” (May 17, 2002)

 

Jakob Winnberg

“An Aesthetics of Vulnerability: The Sentimentum and the Novels of Graham Swift” (June 2, 2001)

 

LICENTIATE THESES DEFENCES

 

Cecilia Lindhé

“Att överskrida utan att överge. Modernitet och intermedialitet i Kerstin

Ekmans En stad av ljus och Händelser vid vatten” (September 30,  2004)

 

Jonas Sjölander

“Ericsson, Andersson och den internationella solidariteten. Svensk-colombianska fackliga relationer i den tredje industriella revolutionen - 1978-1984” (December 4, 2003)

 

Staffan Stranne

“Produktion 2000. Från tayloristisk regelstyrning till hegemonisk målstyrning-organisatorisk och ideologisk förändring vid Tarkett i Ronneby under den tredje industriella revolutionen” (December 14, 2001)

 

 

VISITING FACULTY EXAMINERS

 

Professor Thomas Healy, Birkbeck College,  University of London (March 20, 2004)

Professor Graham Huggan, Leeds University (October 28, 2003)

Professor Andrew Gibson, Royal Holloway College, University of London (June 2, 2001)

 

 

VISITING LECTURERS

2004
Prof. David Attwell,  University of Witwatersrand, South Africa “Doing the Postcolonial in South Africa”

Prof. N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles, “Narrating Bits: Rethinking Narrative Theory in the Digital Age”

Prof. Thomas Healy, Birkbeck College,  University of London, “The Wonderful Years: Elizabeth I in the Protestant Imagination”

2003
Prof. Jennifer Birkett, University of Birmingham, “Representations of Women in the French Fin-de-Siècle: Dead-Ends and Fresh Beginnings”

Dr. Yvonne Leffler, Karlstad University. “I’m coming to get you: perspektiv och positioner i den moderna skräckberättelsen”

Prof. Stan Smith, Nottingham Trent University, “The Poetry of W. H. Auden”

Prof. Alan R.Velie, Oklahoma University, “Native American Literature in the 21st  Century”

Prof. Ann Fisher-Wirth, Fulbright Visiting Professor at Uppsala University, “Storied Earth, Storied Lives: Contemporary American Environmental Writing”

Prof. Graham Huggan, Leeds University, “Comperative Postcolonial Studies”

Prof. Steven Shaviro, University of Washington “The Life (after Death) of

Postmodern Emotions”

 

Sheila Ghose, Stockholm University, “The Educational Tourist? On Reading Postcolonial Literature”

 

2002

Prof. Richard Begam, University of Wisconsin, “Ulysses, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Decolonization”

Prof. Jay David Bolter, Georgia Institute Technology, “Computer technology as (de)humaniser: Representing artificial intelligence in 2001 and the virtual reality in The Matrix”

Prof. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

Prof. Michael Bell, University of Warwick

Prof. Kenneth  Knoespel, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Thinking Space: Cognition and Visualization in Digital Space”

_____. “Thoughts on Building a New Model:  Humanities in the World of Engineering”

Prof. Wendy Steiner, University of Pennsylvania, “On Beauty”

 

2001

Dr. Bo Ekelund and Dr. Mattias Blom, Uppsala University, “Literary Generations and Social Authority”

Dr. Liz Kella, Uppsala University

Prof. John Rickard, Bucknell University “Machine Dreams: Evolutionary Fictions and Realities”

Dr. Susan Schreibman, New Jersey Institute of Technology, ”The Aesthetics and Politics of Gender and Modernism: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse”

_______.  “Power-Beauty-[hyper]Text or Is the Medium the Message?”

Prof. Harold Schweizer, Bucknell University, “Love and Death in American Poetry”

 

2000

Prof. Jeremy Jennings, Birmingham University

Prof. Charles Lock, Copenhagen University, “Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Publishing”

Thomas Vargish, University of Maryland, “In the Real World: The Cultural Currency of the Liberal Arts” 

 

CURRENT RESEARCH

Kalle Bergman
The current research project is grounded in Bergman’s initial research interests presented in his dissertation: questions of identity, integration, and the process of building a state and how the national discourse effects our view of these phenomena and processes. Within a team-project, “The Cross Border Region,” which investigates the Baltic region, its construction, and its place in history, Bergman studies Karlskrona and the growth of the city as part of an innovative and technical 18th  century project.

 

Stephen Donovan
Editing Joseph Conrad’s "Under Western Eyes" for Penguin (forthcoming January 2007). Book project "James Joyce and the Shock of the News: Modernism, Literature, Journalism." Journal articles in progress on: the first Irish-made feature film, "Knocknagow" (1918); T. S. Eliot and literary critic Charles Whibley; newspaper baron Alfred Harmsworth and serial fiction; Swedish literary critic Yrjö Hirn and translator Karin Hirn.

 

Danuta Fjellestad
“Masters and Monsters: Intellectual Self-Fashioning in American Autobiography.”
The book project undertakes an investigation of the figure of the intellectual as it emerges through the genre of autobiography in twentieth-century America; it examines the discursive constructions of the models of intellectual selfhood in an attempt to sketch the twentieth-century repertoire of the images of the intellectual, paying special attention to the gendering of these images.

“From Metafiction to Technotext: ‘Narrative Beauty’ and Materiality.”

Both inspired and provoked by the claims made by two leading critics of digital literature, Janet Murray and N.Katherine Hayles, the study explores the relation between narrative beauty and materiality in metafiction, artists’ books, and hypertext fiction.

 

Peter Forsgren
“I vansklighetens land. Genus, genre and modernitet i Elin Wägners smålandsromaner.” (Eng: “In the Land of Risk. Gender, Genre and Modernity in Elin Wägner’s Småland Novels.”) The book project investigates the various ways in which social critic, feminist, peace- and environmental activist Elin Wägner presents the dilemma of modern development (with emphasis on the situation of women). The project, financed by Vetenskapsrådet, will be completed in 2005.

 

Anna Forssberg Malm
A book project which compares the development of literature and that of the media. More specifically, it deals with how the press, film, and digital technologies have affected the development of prose narrative forms. This project focuses on a selection of authors such as Victoria Benedictsson, August Strindberg, and Hjalmar Bergman.

 

Ingrid Millbourn
Current research projects deal with explaining political and economical ideologies from a theory of processes of learning where the interaction between awareness and practice is crucial. Capital theories of identification and power are implemented. In another project she deals with the meeting between jesters and their audience where psychoanalytic affect theory is used.

 

Inger Pettersson
Research project together with Dr. Jessica Enevold on the Latinization of popular culture in the U.S. and in Sweden. Special attention is given to Latino features in the Swedish selections for the annual Eurovision Song Contest between the years of 2001 and 2004, the growth of salsa as a popular dance and cultural arena in Sweden, and the hyped marketing of a particular Latina/o appearance.

 

Staffan Stranne
Book-length study of the history of Swedish Paper Industry Worker’s Foundation 1968-2004.

 

 

DOCORAL DISSERTATIONS IN PROGRESS

Maria Engberg

“The Aesthetics and Poetics of Digital Poetry”

The dissertation explores how poetic practices are shaped by the technologies by which they are written and published. The study involves investigating the antecedents of new media aesthetic practices by avant-garde and experimental traditions of art and poetry tracing back to the late 19th century. It is grounded in several scholarly approaches, e.g. media and visual studies, modernist and postmodernist poetics, and new media and electronic literature theories. Among the poets discussed are John Cayley, Jim Rosenberg, and Stephanie Strickland. The dissertation project also involves producing a multimedia web-based artefact.

 

Vicky J. Gatzouras

“Negotiating Ethnic Identity: Family Matters in Greek-American Literature”

Gatzouras’s dissertation examines six Greek-American literary works as ethnic identity narratives, more specifically, as narratives that probe the complexities and dynamics involved in the process of ethnic identity formation. It identifies and demonstrates the way family, in its various figurations, makes up an intrinsic but complex site of ethnic self-identification for the American-born narrators, whose identities are also prominently marked by issues of gender and class, components that make up each narrator’s specific social location. A few of the literary texts included for analysis are Catherine Temma Davidson’s The Priest Fainted (1998), Nicholas Papandreou’s A Crowded Heart (1998), and the Pulitzer Prize awarded novel Middlesex (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides.

 

Cecilia Lindhé

“Från stad till cyberrymd-från gudinna till cyborg: intermedialitet och estetik i Kerstin Ekmans författarskap”

Lindhé’s dissertation explores issues of intermediality, aesthetics, and gender in three novels by the Swedish author Kerstin Ekman: City of Light (1983), Blackwater (1993), and Revive Me (1996). The concept of intermediality is particularly focused on the relationships between the literary text and other media, such as photography, film, and digital narratives. Lindhé argues that the incorporation of different media on a thematic  as well as a formal level creates a dynamic oscillation between a technological aesthetic and an info-aesthetics, and that this instance of modernity mirrors as well as engineers gender representations.

 

Ingrid Nilsson

“Translation: the Effects of Language Specific Characteristics on Strategies and Processing”

The aim of the study is to examine, primarily through comparing Swedish and English texts, how language-specific characteristics, such as spatial expressions, influence strategies and processes in written production of a second language, and translations in particular. Results could be of importance to practical studies concerning the effects of source language on target language in translations and in language teaching, as well as to more theoretical studies concerning language typology and the relation between language systems and language use(s). The study will be aimed primarily towards spatial directional expressions, and will include latency studies and eye movement studies, as well as picture descriptions and structured translation.

 

Åse Nygren

“The Narration of Suffering in Sherman Alexie’s Prose Fiction” Nygren’s disseration focuses on Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie’s narration of trauma and suffering. Nygren argues that Alexie’s fiction both calls attention to the actual existence of a collective trauma in the Indian community and to the inherent difficulties of representing suffering. Nygren also explores the implications of narrating suffering the comic mode, focusing particularly on Alexie’s use of the caricature. In her discussion on the comic, Nygren poses questions regarding the possible liberating and transformatory effects of the comic.

 

Inger Pettersson

“An Invitation to Latinidad: Figures of Trauma, Testimony, and Translation in U.S. Latina Fiction”

The fictional works discussed are Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salomé, Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo, and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban. The thesis explores how these works of fiction narrate Latina experiences of cultural and linguistic alterity through the notion of latinidad, a concept that is defined and discussed as cultural oppositional strategies that counter an invisibility of a past and present Latina/o America. The novels are seen as intervening in the ongoing cultural articulation of Latina/o identity in the United States.

 

Jonas Sjölander

“Solidaritetens omvägar. Facklig internationalism i den tredje industriella revolutionen - Metall i Colombia 1976 till 1986”

The study deals with the historical compromise between labour and capital – the so-called “Swedish model” – and the abandonment of the compromise in connection with the third industrial revolution. The main focus is on the transformations in working life and labour internationalism from 1970 to 1990. The strategies of the trade union regarding the protection of workers’ rights at local, national, and international levels are of particular interest in the study. The relations between the Company Union Group at Ericsson, the Swedish Metal Workers Federation and the local unions at Ericsson’s factories in Colombia are examined in depth. The research is conducted through archive studies and interviews according to oral history theories. The theoretical perspectives in the dissertation are mainly inspired by postcolonial and world system theories.