Maria Damkjær

Short presentation

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 2025, she successfully defended her book Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines and was granted the title of Dr. Phil.

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

Marias newest book, Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines (Oxford University Press, 2025), focuses on hidden advertising, page fillers, and other unusual genres in British periodicals from the nineteenth century. The book argues that narrative fiction can be defined from its least recognised, most hybridized examples in print culture. Fiction on the Page was awarded the 2025 BAVS Rosemary Mitchell Prize for a Second Monograph by the British Association for Victorian Studies.

Maria is also 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/

Maria's is currently working on a very different project, an exploration of the importance of the book in contemporary fantasy literature. She is writing on authors like Martin, Jemisin, Le Guin, and others.

CV

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