Ecocritical Perspectives – Humanity, Nature, Literature, 7.5 ECTS (LVGN13)

Literature I: Analyzing and Interpreting Literary Texts, 7.5 ECTS (LVGN01)

Literature I: History of Literature from 1870 to Today, 7.5 ECTS (LV0001)

Literature II: Term Paper, 7.5 ECTS (LV2000)

Bachelor's Course in Literature: Bachelor's Essay, 15 ECTS (LV3000)

My research is concerned with literature's distinctive traits, values, and modes of expression, but also with how the manners of reading demanded by literary texts may be relevant beyond a textual sphere. My intellectual influences primarily stem from continental philosophy – especially deconstruction – and psychoanalysis.

Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University, June-July 2022.
Visiting Scholar at the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, September-December 2021.

Dissertation

In March 2025, I defended my dissertation, "Creaturely Metaphors in D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Virginia Woolf," which the Swedish Academy awarded with Karin and Karl Ragnar Gierow's grant for laudable research in Literary Studies.

The thesis constitutes a theorization of the spectrality of metaphor. It examines the kinds of readings demanded by this trope, in respone to a criticism against metaphorical interpretations that is prevalent within literary animal studies as well as the posthumanities at large. Focusing upon animal metaphors in three modernist novels, I show that this wariness is largely a result of a conception of metaphor as a trope of substitution. Instead, the dissertation understands metaphor as a spectral kind of imagery. As such, this figurative mode offers an invitation to otherness within linguistic artworks.

As part of this theorization, I analyze peripheral animal figures in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), H.D.’s Asphodel (written in the 1920s), and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). These novels exemplify how questions of both animality and metaphor come into particular focus in many texts from the early twentieth century. In their modernist renegotiations of literary conventions, the three works display how the inevitable deferral of final meaning into the future is always haunted by the past, thus destabilizing the presence of what ‘is.’

The study is informed by a trans- and interdisciplinary perspective, primarily influenced by deconstruction, hermeneutics, tropology, and animal studies, while also gathering insights from fields such as zoology and ethology. In particular, the project draws upon Jacques Derrida’s hauntology in order to spectralize (or make deconstructive) Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic conception of metaphor as simultaneously stating is and is not, and as a seeing as that invents rather than reports resemblance. This theoretical framework shows how metaphor is creatively alive—animated—but therefore also creaturely vulnerable—mortal.

It is this susceptible creatureliness that constitutes metaphor’s possibility for literarity, for the sake of which the issue of animal metaphors is an ethical one that reaches beyond the problem of representation, toward questions of how to read and translate not just a text, but any other; of the sacrifice necessary for all forms of relationality; and of how the future may be welcomed in its absolute unknowability.

Research Interests

Literary Theory, Literature and Philosophy, Modes of Reading, Deconstruction, Poetics, Tropology, Aesthetics, Modernism.

Peer-Reviewed Publications
Metaphor, Animals, Modernism: Specters of Literarity. Palgrave Macmillan (2026).
“Carrying the Other in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ and Last Poems.”
Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene, ed. Terry Gifford. Edinburgh University Press (September 2025).
“More Swallows to Follow: Sweeping, Swirling, Wheeling Turns in H.D’s Asphodel.” Modernist
Cultures, 18.2 (2023).

Selected Other Publications
“En metafor är litteratur i miniatyr.” Svenska Dagbladet (7 March 2025).
“Hur disciplinen disciplinerar läsningen.” Svensk filosofi (3 February 2025).
”Ämnet för vårt ämne.” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, 53.1 (December 2023).
“Review of Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene by Marija Grech.” Green
Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (September 2023).
”Metaforens animaliska rörlighet: Nattfjärilar och djurspråk i Virginia Woolfs The Waves.” Aiolos
– Tidskrift för litteratur, teori och estetik, 74–75 (March 2023).
“Asphodel överlevde lyckligtvis sin författares önskan om destruktion.” Dagens Nyheter (11
August 2022).
“Index of Woolf Studies Annual Volumes 1–10 (1995-–2004), Part Two: Source References,”
compiled together with Oliver Case, Pamela Weidman, and Benjamin D. Hagen. Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 20 (2022), pp. 176-242.
“Review of The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form by Rachel Murray.” The
Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2021), pp. 255-258.