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Outline Biography
- Cand. Phil. in Scandinavian Literature (University of Copenhagen)
- PhD (University of Edinburgh)
Research Interests
My main area of research interest is in Scandinavian nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. I am particularly interested in the treatment of place and the manifestations of mobility and modernity in Scandinavian novel writing, including the mapping and problematisation of nation space and its communities and the representation of the ‘foreign’ and the ‘exotic’.
My work is also focused on the interface between novel and travel writing. In 2007 I published a monograph which explores these themes in Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf (reviewed in the journals Studi Nordici, Scandinavica, Finsk Tidskrift and Edda). In a related research context I have investigated Hans Christian Andersen’s novelistic experimentation and his innovations in travel writing in a number of articles and papers and in a recent edited volume of New Approaches (2007) to his work. My research on Lagerlöf and Andersen may be seen as contributions to the re-assessment of two Scandinavian cultural figures of ‘world literature’ status, highlighting proto-modernist aspects of their oeuvre as well as reductive patterns in their reception history. The interrogation of notions of centre and periphery, which plays a part in the above work, forms the main focus of a comparative anthology of studies in Scandinavian and Scottish literature, Centring on the Peripheries, which I published in 2007.
Research activity
I am developing a further, but not disconnected research interest in early Scandinavian cinema and its dialogic relationship with European literature. In this context I am collaborating with C. Claire Thomson, lecturer in Film Studies at UCL, on a research project entitled ‘Space, Body and Spectacle in Scandinavian Silent and Early Sound Film’. www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/filmstudies/spacebodyspectacle
In this field I have thus far contributed a couple of papers and one book chapter.
Publications
Publications list for Bjarne Thorup Thomsen
Supervision
Projects supervised by Bjarne Thorup Thomsen
Teaching
Course Organiser of:
- Danish 1B
- Danish Literature 2
- The Enlightenment in Scandinavia
- History of the Scandinavian Novel
- Scandinavian Literature for Children and Young People
This article was published on Oct 30, 2012