Primary fields of research

I conduct research from a transdisciplinary perspective, drawing on my background in literary studies to analyze cultural and political developments as well as shifting forms of communication.

I am particularly interested in the connections between past and present, the history of emotions and experience (especially in relation to mental illness), and political change and communication in the welfare state.

Current research

I am currently affiliated with the collaborative NordForsk-funded research project: PastForward: The Political Uses of the Past in Digital Discourses about Nordic Futures. The project examines and compares how politicians in the Nordic countries - Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland - strategically used specific narratives of the past to strengthen and legitimize their visions for the future in the lead-up to the latest national elections. See more here.

In my PhD dissertation The Concealment of Mental Maladies - A  History of Experience, I explored the historically contingent experiences of mental illness in relation to the developing Danish welfare state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on ecological approaches to mental afflictions, end employing different kinds of empirical sources, conceptualized as "cultural testimonies" - patient records, oral history interviews and fiction - I specifically focused on how the shifting dynamics of secrecy and disclosure have shaped the situated, individual and collective experiences of mental illness. Read more here.