Lydia Wistisen Senior lecturer, associate professor

At the department, I mostly teach children’s and young adult literature but also feminist and modern literary history. 

My research concerns young adult literature and the relationship between text, space and identity.

Since fall 2002, I work on a project called "

The Child in the Wasteocene: Trash Thematics, Waste Aesthetics, and Environmental Ethics in Swedish Children’s Culture 1969–1977", finansed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The purpose of the study is to explore the many functions of waste in Swedish children’s picture books, television series, and theater performances from 1967 to 1977, a period that has been highlighted by previous research as notably concerned with green politics, environmental degradation, and recycling. The project claims that late 1960s and 1970s Swedish children’s culture developed a new understanding of ecology by embracing the collapsing nature-culture divide of the “wasteocene” – the age of waste. See 

In my doctoral thesis Gångtunneln: Urbana erfarenheter i svensk ungdomslitteratur 1890–2010 (2017) I show that the urban experience is a fundamental part of the development of the Swedish young adult novel by analysing city representations in Swedish young adult literature from 1890 to 2010. By suggestion that there is a strong bond between the notion of the urban and that of adolescence this study examines continuity and change in representations of coming-of-age, focusing especially on intersections between age, gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality.

2018–2020, I worked with a postdoctoral project concerning youth culture in post war literature, finansed by Anna Ahlström och Ellen Terserus stiftelse. See Too Much Feeling: S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), Conflicting Emotions, Identity, and Socialization och Skit i traditionerna Generationskonflikt, störda livslinjer och misslyckande i Leif Panduros Rend mig i traditionerne (1958)

I am also interested in literary representations of the large scale post-war modernist housing areas in Europe. See Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Children’s and Young Adult Literature

I review children’s and young adult literature for Dagens Nyheter. I have been a part of the editorial board of Barnelitterært Forskningstidsskrift, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, and Aiolos: Tidskrift för litteratur, teori och estetik.