Kirsten Thisted

Employments:

1988–1990: Postgraduate Fellow at the Institute of Nordic Philology, University of Copenhagen.

1990-1993: Assistant Professor at the Institute of Greenlandic, Ilisimatusarfik/University of Greenland.    

1993-1994: External lecturer at the Minority Studies Section, Institute of Nordic Philology, University of Copenhagen.

1994-1996: Research fellowat theInstitute of Nordic Philology, University of Copenhagen.  

1997–2001: Assistant professor at the Minority Studies Section, Institute of Nordic Philology, University of Copenhagen.

2002 - : Associate professor at the Minority Studies Section, Institute of Nordic Philology, University of Copenhagen. In 2005 the department moved to the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies.

2009: Fulbright Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Scholarships, individual and collective research projects  

• 1994-1996:  From oral tradition to written literature. 3 year scholarship from the Carlsberg Foundation in order to study and edit parts of the Rink collection at the Royal Library in Copenhagen.   
• 1993-96: Publication of the Rink texts funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and KVUG (Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland).  
• 2002-2003: As blubber and water? Mutual interpretations of the cultural encounter between Denmark and Greenland. 2 year scholarship funded by the Danish Research Committee.
• 2006-2009 Arctic Discourses. A project with active participants from Tromsø University, Umeå University, University of Copenhagen, Amsterdam University, Vienna Museum and University College, London.
• 2006-2009: The Urban Greenland. Movements, Narratives, Creativity.  Research project at ToRS, Copenhagen University. Funded by The Danish Research Council for Humanities.
• 2007-2010 From Oral Tradition to Rap. Literatures of the Polar North. IPY (International Polar Year) project. A collaboration of researchers from Greenland, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Canada, Great Britain and Alaska.
• 2007: Tranquebar in Danish Representation The Danish National Museum’s Tranquebar initiative. Funded by Bikubenfonden. 
• 2009: Fulbright Scholarship For Visiting Professors. 
• 2009-2010: Cosmopolitanism, Post-Nationalism And The Cultural Self In Recent Nordic Literature And Culture. A collaboration of literary scholars from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Funded by the Research Council of Norway.
• 2009-2013 SARP (The Sámi Art Research Project), Funded by The Research Council of Norway and the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, University of Tromsø.
• 2012-2016 Leader of the international research project Denmark and the New North Atlantic.
• 2016- Project participant in the “Centre of Excellence for Resources, Extractive Industries and Sustainable Arctic Communities (REXSAC)”
• 2016- Project participant in ”Politics of Postcoloniality and Sustainability in the Arctic (POSUSA)”

Networks 

Since 2018 member of the board of the DINO Network, Diversity in Nordic Literature

Guest lectures

Guest lectures held at Danish, Nordic, European, American and Australian universities; including Roskilde, Aalborg, Odense, Kolding, Uppsala, Stockholm, Tromsø, Nuuk, Reykiavik, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Bonn, Bochum, Münster, Greifswald, Basel, Berlin, Bologna, Madison, Berkeley, UCLA, Minneapolis, Canberra.

Primary fields of research

My focus is minority majority relations, postcolonial relations. I am particularly interested in how such asymmetric power relations are negotiated through literary and other aesthetic expressions. My regional competence is Greenland / Scandinavia.

Keywords for research and supervision: Narratives / discourses about (collective) identities and belonging, Emotional communities, Emotional economies, Cultural Translation, Cultural memory and forgetting, Representation, Denmark-Greenland relations, Greenlandic literature, media and film.

Current research:

Between Pride and Shame: Postcolonial Renegotiations of Greenland as Part of Danish Cultural Heritage

The project is funded by the Augustinus Foundation as part of the program "Research in Cultural Heritage". The project examines Danish collective and personal memory culture about Greenland, in a time when pride in Greenland as part of Danish cultural heritage is under pressure due to the postcolonial approach to Danish-Greenlandic relations. Please visit:

https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres-and-projects/between-pride-and-shame/

Recently completed projects:

Affective economies: How are places, communities and identities constructed?

I was the head of this research task, which was a part of the Centre of Excellence for Resources, Extractive Industries and Sustainable Arctic Communities (REXSAC), funded by NORDFORSK. The research task examined how emotional economies affect decision-making processes around industrialization and mining as much as financial considerations - and how emotions dominate all parties in the process, not just potential opponents of projects.

Selected output:

Thisted, K. (2020). “Emotions, finances and independence. Uranium as a ‘happy object’ in the Greenlandic debate on secession from Denmark”, Polar Record, Vol. 56, e 1.

Sejersen, F. & Thisted, K. (2021). Mining Emotions: Affective Approaches to Resource Extraction, in Nord, D. (red.), Nordic Perspectives on the Responsible Development of the Arctic: Pathways to Action (369-389). Springer Polar Sciences.

Denmark and the New North Atlantic

In this project 15 researchers investigated the renegotiations of identities that are currently taking place in all parts of the Scendinavian North Atlantic, as a result of independence processes, climate change and globalization. The project revisited the history of  Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which were once part of the Danish (Danish-Norwegian) empire, and examined the current efforts to create a new, strong brand for the Scandinavian Arctic. The project was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. 

Publication: 

Thisted, K & Gremaud, A-S 2020 (eds.): Denmark and the New North Atlantic: Narratives and Memories of a Former Empire. Vol. I-II. Aarhus University Press.