Maria Damkjær

Room 24.4.48

Maria Damkjær researches British literature and print culture in the nineteenth century. She holds a PhD from King’s College London (2013). From 2014 to 2018, she held an individual postdoc-stipend from the Carlsberg Foundation, hosted by the Department for English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

In 2019 Maria was awarded the Teacher of the Year Award for the University of Copenhagen: https://video.ku.dk/video/57453907/undervisningsprisen-2019

Maria is the author of Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palgrave, 2016). The book argues that nineteenth-century texts gave domesticity not just a spatial, but also a temporal dimension. Novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as periodicals, cookery books and albums, all showed domesticity as a process. Time, Domesticity and Print Culture argues that texts’ material form – serialised, fragmented or reappropriated – had a profound influence on their representation of domestic time. Time, Domesticity and Print Culture was shortlisted for the 2016 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize: http://rs4vp.org/colby-prize/

Marias current research focuses on hidden advertising, page fillers, and other unusual genres in British periodicals from the nineteenth century. She has also been connected to the research project Cultures of Topology, which has resulted in an article on the locus amoenus in the British novel from Austen to Wilde. In 2017 Maria published an article on umbrellas, comedy and masculinity in Victorian culture in the journal Victorian Literature and Culture.

Maria teaches British literary history from Beowulf to today, and often moderates topic courses on time, materiality or history in literature.

Supervision fields:

• British literature and culture from 1790 to the present
• contemporary popular literature and genre literature (especially SF and fantasy)
• gender and feminism
• Material Culture and Object Studies

2021-2025: Associate Professor in English Literature, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen

2017-2020: Teaching Assistant, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen

2014-2017: Postdoc, financed by a Carlsberg Individual Postdoc Scholarship, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen

2010-2013: Ph.d. in English Literature, King's College London. Supervisor: Professor Clare Pettitt.

2003-2009: Masters of Art (cand.mag.) in Comparative Literature, University of Copenhagen