Bo G Ekelund Professor

Bo G. Ekelund received his PhD from Uppsala University in May 1995. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of English in Uppsala from 1996 to 2000. Since the summer of 2000 he has been a senior lecturer at Stockholm University, and was promoted to Professor of English Literature in 2021. Ekelund's dissertation, In the Pathless Forest: John Gardner's Literary Project, dealt with the US writer John Gardner, best known for novels like Grendel (1971) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). However, more than a study of a single author and his works, the dissertation used John Gardner as a lens through which changes in the US literary field from the late 1950s to the early 1980s could be explored. This interest in literary generations and large-scale shifts is present in the research project "Literary Generations and Social Authority," funded by the National Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, which analyzed three cohorts of US prose fiction writers (955 authors), seeking to describe and explain the changing social status of literary authors in the United States during 60 years of the so-called American Century. In an on-going research project with the working title "Studies in an Undead Culture: Scenes of Recognition in literature and politics 1980-2000," Ekelund critically explores of the notion of "recognition" in late 20th-century politics, theory, and literature. The study discusses the politics of identity, the debates over recognition and redistribution, and analyzes the structure of fictional "recognition" in a number of narratives. Ekelund has studied the field of Swedish translations and the reception of international theory by Swedish literary scholars in two research projects funded by the Swedish Research council, “Languages, Education, and Swedish Society 1960-2010” and “Transnational Strategies within Higher Education. Sweden´s Relations to France and the US, 1919-2009.” Most recently the focus of Ekelund’s research has been Caribbean Anglophone fiction and territorial claims in literature, first in a project titled “Geography, society and the symbolic terrain of Anglophone Caribbean fiction,” funded by the Swedish Research Council, and then as a member of the large RJ-funded research program “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature.”  All of these research projects are marked by an adherence to a tradition of critical social theory, in recent times most forcefully represented by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.