I received my Ph D from Uppsala University in 1999 and have been a senior lecturer in literature in the English Department in Stockholm since 2010. In March 2011 I became full professor. Besides my years in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, I was also fortunate enough to spend an extended period from 2003 until 2005 as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg.

I am currently (as of January 2024) the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Vice Rector for Human Science. In this capacity, I chair the Board of the Faculty of Humanities and the Research Committee of Human Science. I am also the vice chair of the Board of the Area of Human Science and a member of the Board of Stockholm University. In addition, I lead the faculty's Budget Committee and the meetings with the Heads of Department.

My thesis explored the work of the three South African writers Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee in relation to the political upheavals of the 1980s. Contrary to common assumptions concerning "anti-apartheid literature", and with a grounding in postcolonial theory, I argued that it was the literariness of their work - rather than its topicality - that enabled its most profound engagement with prevailing historical conflicts.

Since completing my thesis, I have been involved in a number of research projects. These include the research programme ”Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts” that ran from 1999 until 2006, as well as my two individual projects on post-Second World War literature in Southern Africa and ”Inventing World Literature”, a study of translations of and translation in the work of Mia Couto, Clarice Lispector, Assia Djebar and J. M. Coetzee. Over the years, my work has taken a comparative turn, with a special focus on writing in English and Portuguese. In this context, my postcolonial interests have evolved in dialogue with translation theory and current debates on world literature. I was involved in the multidisciplinary research programme Time, Memory and Representation, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2010-2015), completed yet another individual research project called “Beyond Herder: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in Postcolonial Literatures”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2013-2016), and led from 2016 to 2021 the large-scale research programme ”Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures”, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

My research activities have enabled me to establish a broad international network and I cooperate regularly with colleagues from Scandinavia, the UK, France, Portugal, Brazil, USA and southern Africa. I am also on the editorial boards of English Studies in Africa, French Studies in Southern Africa, Safundi, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, The Journal of World Literature and the book series “African Articulations”.

I am an elected member of Academia Europaea since 2018 and of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities since 2023.

Besides academic writing, I contribute occasionally as a critic to Dagens Nyheter. In 2004 I published Efter västerlandet, a collection of postcolonial essays, and 2010 saw the publication of my novel, Leve fortsättarna. In 2018, I published (together with Marcia Schuback) a Swedish translation from the Portuguese of the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa’s collection of short stories, Primeiras estórias.