My research is informed by my broad interest in aesthetics, American and European literary history, art history, and the history of ideas. Place and space are also central to my research. I study literary texts in relation to places as varied as tourist destinations and formal institutions, such as academia and higher education. While most of my research has focused on modernist poetry, my research interests include American literature in general, modern and contemporary poetry, and Scandinavian poetry.
I also take an interest in literature education, most recently concerning the history of poets and poetry in higher education.
I have published extensively on modernist poetry and modernism more broadly. My doctoral dissertation, “Swarming European Consciousness”: Europe and Tradition in the Work of William Carlos Williams (Linköping University Press, 2015) examined Williams’s relationship with Europe. I have published articles on H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Areas I have explored include little magazines, agency, ecopoetics, and space/place. I have also published on postwar and contemporary American poetry and literature in general, with articles on Jack Kerouac and Siri Hustvedt, focusing on ecocriticism and aesthetics respectively. Other publications have dealt with topics such as nostalgia in American poetry, poetry and science, and the transformation of literary texts as they appear in textbooks for EFL and literature education.
Europe and Modern American Poetry
The Europe Trope is a research project that explores the important role that European travel has played for American poetry, from the ways in which the modernists tackled tradition by way of European travel to the postwar poets’ reckoning with their modernist forebears in Europe’s places.
This project has resulted in the book Constructions of Europe in Modern American Poetry, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (2025).
Research for this project has been funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond RJ Sabbatical, The Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation for Research in the Humanities, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, The Åke Wiberg Foundation, The Magnus Bergvall Foundation, and The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.
Poets in Higher Education – Interactions between Forms of Knowledge
What is the relationship between poetry and pedagogy? Between artistic and academic knowledge? Poets in Academia: Poetics, Praxis, and Pedagogy is a research project that investigates the work modern American poets have performed in higher education, especially in the United States. Through archival work, I examine the teaching materials of poets who worked in academia and other forms of education. Above all, I want to find out how poets’ poetics and aesthetics inform their pedagogy and how teaching and academic work have shaped their poetry and poetics.
Initial archival work on this project has been funded by The Åke Wiberg Foundation and The Magnus Bergvall Foundation.
Research Collaboration
I am the Vice President of the William Carlos Williams Society.
I am a co-editor of the work-in-progress, Approaching to Teaching the Poetry and Prose of William Carlos Williams (MLA).
Outreach
I have been invited to lecture on poetry and literature education in schools, both to students and to practicing teachers. In 2022, I participated in a project called “A Year of Poetry” in a Swedish middle school and high school, giving talks about poetry. I have published pieces on poetry and American politics, poetry and poetics, and ecocriticism in daily newspapers and popular-science publications.
