I hold a bi-national PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from Stockholm University, Sweden, and the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany. During my PhD, I was employed as a research assistant at the Chair of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies at JLU and as the academic coordinator of the International PhD Program (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP) at the GCSC.
Research
At Tema T, I am a member of the Nuclear Natures project (funded by VR, 2022-26) which studies the effects of the nuclear power life cycle on non-human environments. The interdisciplinary project encompasses three phases of nuclear power production (active nuclear reactors, plants in the process of being decommissioned, long-term nuclear waste storage facilities) and three countries (Sweden, Finland, Germany). I currently explore two projects related to Nuclear Natures: One investigating the visitor centers at active and recently phased-out nuclear power plants in Sweden and Germany and the stories they tell about nuclear power, energy histories, and local communities and geographies. A second project looks at the term “grüne Wiese” (“green field”, the imagined end-point of nuclear decommissioning) in German nuclear discourses and the cultural imaginaries connected to it. I am also interested in the so-called ”nuclear renaissance” and the environmental rhetoric of contemporary pro-nuclear activism.
My doctoral dissertation Narrating Nuclear Disaster examined the various ways in which stories about the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima are told in fictional and non-fictional texts. I paid particular attention to the formal features of the texts, asking, for instance: Why there are so many thrillers and crime novels about Chernobyl? And how do central concerns of the genre (who is guilty, who is a victim?) relate to socio-political and historical debates about the effects of the reactor accident? Another chapter examined the portrayal of spatial and temporal flows of radioactive materials and nuclear discourse in post-Fukushima literature, positioning nuclear disaster narratives as texts of and for the Anthropocene.
