Nicklas Hållén

My research interests include African literature and publishing in Africa, emergent literatures and travel literature, among other things.

I am a member of the KuFo researchgroup. 

I teach literature in English, mainly on the Master program. Courses that I have designed for the program focus on literary theory and African literature.  

I finished my PhD studies at Umeå University in 2011 and have since then worked or been based at Uppsala University, University of York and Linnaeus University. My postdoc project focused on diasporic travel writing about Africa. After my postdoc I was a member of the research project African Street Literature and the Future of Literary Form, which was based at Uppsala University (Swedish Research Council) and the Eurpean Research Council-funded research project Almeda: African Literature Metadata. I have recently finished the STINT funded project "Researching Ephemerality: Developing methods for studying the informal in popular culture" together with a colleague from Machakos Univeristy, Kenya. Currently, I work on the Swedish Research Council-funded project Reading beyond the close/distant divide: Nairobi’s formal and informal literary field, which will run from 2026 and 2029. While it is formally a one-person project, I collaborate closely with colleagues at Kenyatta University, Kenya, and Uppsala University.