Hejsan, Hallo, Hi!

I am a scholar, translator, writer, and teacher.

My work spans Nordic, German and comparative literature, philosophy and film in their historical contexts, with interdisciplinary anchors in environmental humanities, existentialism/phenomenology, queer theory, and translation studies. The main arc of my scholarly research traces back to the question of the embodied interaction with the material and metaphorical world, particularly through linguistic, spatial and temporal dimensions.

I am currently a PhD candidate in German Literature and Thought and Cinema and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University. My dissertation project traces the ecopoetics of flesh across the 20th century by comparatively studying German and Nordic poetry. Drawing on ecocriticism, existentialism, phenomenology, and histories of the body, I pursue close readings centered around themes of ensoulment, abjection, and anxiety.

Future projects include a study of the transnational cultural legacies of “race biology,” a polemical history of translation in the 20th century, and a study of extinction culture.

During the 2023-2024 year, I am a guest researcher (gästdoktorand) in the Department of Comparative Literature at Södertörn University (Stockholm), thanks to a fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. During the 2024-2025 year, I am a guest researcher (Gastdoktorand) at the Institute for German and Dutch Philology at Freie Universität Berlin, thanks to a Fulbright grant.

I am also a literary translator from primarily Swedish, Norwegian, and German. I was an ALTA Emerging Translator Mentee in 2022, mentored by Kira Josefsson.

As a first-generation college student, I earned my BA in German, Scandinavian & Dutch at the University of Minnesota and later my MA in Scandinavian Languages & Literatures at the University of Washington. I grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota.