• Cand. Phil. in Scandinavian Literature (University of Copenhagen)
• PhD (University of Edinburgh)

Bjarne Thomsen’s main research interests concern aesthetic, affective and ideological dimensions of place and space in modern Scandinavian literature, with a particular focus on the novel and on travel writing. His work explores topics such as the mapping and problematisation of nation space and its communities, the interrogation of notions of centre and periphery in narrative, the role of transnational thought in textual topography, and instances and modes of geomodernism.

Bjarne Thomsen’s work displays, moreover, interests in the relationship between national representation and international spread of culture, in questions of textual and cultural hybridity, and in culture’s capacity to translate itself to new genres, new media and new audiences. Thus, Bjarne Thomsen has an additional, but not disconnected research interest in Scandinavian silent cinema and its dialogic relationship with prestige literature as well as in early Scandinavian film criticism. In this field he has so far contributed a couple of papers and one book chapter.

He is also interested in and have published on Danish literary history and literary history writing more broadly, and he has written on working-class autobiographies.

Research activity

Bjarne Thomsen's research activity has its main focus on the aesthetic, affective and ideological construction of place and space in Scandinavian nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, including travel writing, with a particular emphasis on the negotiation of region, nation and transnationalism. In 2007 he published a monograph that explores national mapping and the role of national and transnational thought in the work of Swedish novelist and Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf. In a related research context he has investigated Hans Christian Andersen’s novelistic experimentation and his innovations in travel writing in a number of articles and papers and in a co-edited book of New Approaches (Norvik Press, 2007) to his work. His 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 work as well as reductive patterns in their reception history. The scrutiny 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 he published in 2007 (Norvik Press).

Recently, he has co-edited and contributed to a volume of international scholarship offering a range of new perspectives on Lagerlöf’s work, on its transmissions into other media and a range of European cultures, and on the author’s influential public persona and ideological involvements. The book is entitled Re-Mapping Lagerlöf: Performance, Intermediality and European Transmissions, is co-edited with Helena Forsås-Scott and Lisbeth Stenberg, and was published by Nordic Academic Press in May 2014. Additionally, Bjarne Thomsen has recently researched new aspects of Lagerlöf’s more marginal production and the relationship of this production to the culture of periodicals. In this field, he is planning a further study focused on a substantial unpublished late novel manuscript by Lagerlöf entitled Rönnebergs sparbank, which has so far received little critical attention.

Currently, Bjarne Thomsen is working on questions of topographies of modernism and affective mapping in Nobel Prize-winning proletarian author Eyvind Johnson’s early urban narratives as well as on ideology and affectivity of place and the role of memory in his travel writing and autobiographical sketches. He has recently published a contribution entitled ‘Eyvind Johnson’s Hybrid North. Dynamics of Place and Time in Travelogues and Memory Sketches 1943-1963’ to a special issue (2014:1) of the Journal of Northern Studies, focused on Northern Swedish literature and marking the city of Umeå’s status as European Capital of Culture in 2014. Additionally, he has newly published two articles on Johnson’s 1920s work: ‘Geomodernism and Affect in Eyvind Johnson’s Urban North’ (Edda. Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research, 2015:1, pp. 18-31) and ‘Marginal and Metropolitan Modernist Modes in Eyvind Johnson’s Early Urban Narratives’ (Scandinavica, vol. 54:2, 2015, pp. 61-90). Bjarne Thomsen plans to develop these and further studies into a monograph focused on topographies of modernism in the author’s early work.

Course Organiser of:

• History of the Scandinavian Novel
• Ingmar Bergman and Cinema
• Scandinavian Literature for Children and Young People
• Scandinavian Literature 2