Kirstine Nielsen Degn

Short presentation

I specialize in Danish literary and cultural history. In my PhD project, I investigate representations of friendship in Danish novels from the 19th and 21st centuries. My primary focus lies on the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of friendships.

I consider literary history to be an "emotional archive" that offers new insights into how friendships feel and have felt, as well as the broader emotional-historical formations in which experiences of friendship are embedded.

Methodologically, I combine close readings of individual works with digital "distant readings" of several hundred texts. One of the ambitions of the project is to explore how literary history can be written in new ways that highlight voices, perspectives, motifs, and aesthetics otherwise excluded from the main narrative of literary history.

Primary fields of research

• Danish literature from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries
• Friendship
• History of emotions
• Affect theory
• Postcritique
• Digital literary studies

Teaching