Current research projects in Comparative Literature

The Aesthetics of Evil: Memory and Media in Nazi Perpetrator Fiction. (Alexander Kofod-Jensen)
PhD Project with internal funding (2016-2021)

My PhD project explores how memory and intermediality work in contemporary novels on World War II. Focus is first and foremost on the ways in which the Nazi perpetrator is described and narrates from a first–person point of view in a variety of novels such as Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes 2006), Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes (Flughunde1995), Martin Amis’ The Zone of Interest (2014), and Simon Pasternak’s Dødszoner (2013).
Teachers on the borders. (Christina Olin-Scheller, Niklas Gericke, Johan Samuelsson
Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2018-2020)

The overall aim of the project is to deepen knowledge about how teachers of Swedish, History and Biology interpreted the demands of progressivism in Sweden before the big school reforms in the 1950s.
Teaching with Learning Management Systems. Digitalized instructional practices and transformations of subject specific content in the connected classroom. (Christina Olin-Scheller, Marie Tanner, Johan Samuelsson, Yvonne Liljekvist)
Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2020-2022)

This project focuses on the increasingly prevalent use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) in Swedish upper secondary schools, as part of a general digitalisation of classrooms. We focus on LMS systems that are used directly for teaching purposes and investigate how use of LMS changes the classroom as a space for learning. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how use of LMS is of importance for how teaching and learning are construed in classroom interaction, with a specific interest in the school subjects Swedish, Mathematics and History. Research questions are: 1. How is teachers’ and students’ participation in teaching and learning trajectories accomplished when using LMS? 2. How is content of different subjects construed and represented when Learning Management Systems are used? 3. What possibilities and constraints for the organisation and content of teaching do the structures and content created on the LMS afford? Theoretically, the project draws on a media-ecological perspective and on conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how learning and teaching trajectories are accomplished in interaction involving LMS. The study has a video-ethnographic approach, which includes filming of students and teachers, log books, content analysis and interviews. Project findings will contribute to specialised knowledge of learning and teaching and the way in which subject content is shaped in relation to LMS. On a broader level, it will contribute to critical discussions about the terms for education and the role of the classroom in the digitalised school.
Easy reading? Easy reading for young people. The market, the readers och the texts. (Christina Olin-Scheller, Anna Nordenstam)
Internal funding. (2017-2021)

This project aims to deepen the understanding of easy reading literary texts for young adults.
Transformations – school subjects, subject-specific teaching and learning. (Christina Olin-Scheller) Funded by ROSE (Research on Subject Specific Education). (2017-2020)

ROSE research centres on the broad issue of how a content is manifested in teaching and perceived by students and teachers. One way of addressing this problem area is to employ the concept of transformation. The transformation concept involves an interest in what is to be learnt, the teaching content and the interaction between the transformation and the specific practice. It also covers the issue of the relationship between the content of a school subject and the academic discipline. Problematising this relationship from different perspectives has been a prominent feature of ROSE research. Teaching content is transformed in different ways depending on the context in which it is enacted. An overall common research interest in ROSE is how different practices affect and shape subject content. Some of the practices studied are: test design and assessment practice, textbook design and the use of textbooks, teaching literature and teachers’ use of language.
Scandinavian Serial Killer Narratives. (Morten Feldtfos Thomsen, Sofia Wijkmark)
Internal funding (2020-2023

This project investigates Scandinavian serial killer narratives in literature, film and television, produced from 1990 and onwards. The serial killer narrative is regarded as a transcultural phenomenon, and the central purpose of the project is to explore how and to what effect Scandinavian writers and filmmakers have adapted this ostensibly North American genre into a Scandinavian context. Materials investigated include the Thomas Quick case; films such as Nattevagten (1994), Neon Demon (2016), and The House that Jack Built (2018), television series such as Bron/Broen (2011-2017), Den som dræber (2011, 2018) and Wisting (2019), as well as novels by Jo Nesbø, Stig Larsson, Jussi Adler Olsen and others.
Monstrous Intermediality: Intermediality and the Slasher Film (Morten Feldtfos Thomsen)
Internal funding (2019-2023)

This project investigates the form and function of different intermedial strategies in the horror subgenre of the slasher film. Its main object of study is the 1970s and 1980s North American slasher, i.e. films such as Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the Thirteenth (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and several others.
Why some literary works die and some survive over time (Anna Forssberg and Anna Linzie)
Internal funding (2020–2021)

Over time, some literary works survive and some die. What determines whether a text ends up in (and establishes itself as a natural part of) a national literary canon – or not? What determines whether a novel is selected, read and used in educational contexts in school? Based on previous research on Sigfrid Siwertz (Forssberg), an author who has been completely forgotten by today’s readers, and on how literary history is written and how literature is valued based on notions of genre, experiment and authorship (Linzie), the project looks at whether literature that lasts follows a particular pattern. The hypothesis is that literature that is intimately tied to the times when it was written and that upholds the social phenomena it depicts has less chance of surviving than works that question contemporary phenomena and apply a rhetorical perspective (the position from which the author or narrator speaks) from the periphery towards the centre, an underdog perspective.
It’s all about class. Ideas of work and trade in Dickens, Zola and Scandinavian novels 1930–1949
Internal funding 2015–2021

The aim of the project is to increase the understanding of how different social classes’ self-images and views of other classes are reproduced in literature by studying the notions of work and trade that appear in a selection of novels by Dickens and Zola and in a selection of Scandinavian novels 1930–1949, gathered from working class novels and bourgeois novels from the three countries. As such, the project belongs to the research field of literature and class. Methodologically, the project combines phenomenology and performativity to bridge the gap between the textual analysis and interpretation on the one hand and ideologically critical perspectives on the other.