Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen is Professor at the School of Communcation and Culture, Aarhus University.
He is head of Centre for Fictionality Studies and Narrative Research Lab. His projects focus on fictionality conceived of as one of the most fundamental human cognitive skills and as an ability to imagine how something might be, or can be, or would have been or simply: is not. In the wake of Richard Walsh’s The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007), he has contributed to a new approach to fictionality that disconnects fictionality as a communicational and rhetorical resource from a one-to-one relationship with generic fiction. With Simone Zetterberg-Nielsen, he defines fictionality as “intentionally signaled invention in communication” (Distinguishing fictionality 2020). Other research outputs on fictionality includes Travelling Concepts: New Fictionality Studies (2020) and Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (2022).
Louise Brix Jacobsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University. She is co-author of the educational book on fictionality (2013) that won the Danish educational book-prize and co-editor of Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (2022) and Dangers of Fictionality in Media Hoaxing (2023). Recent research projects includes Fake news - løgn og satire (2022) on satirical fake news and how the news hoax in particular can expose and criticize journalistic practices, institutional power and consumer processes. Her research also includes celebrities' use of fictionality as a self-manufacturing strategy (see e.g. "Fiktiobiografisme: Fiktionalisering i kendte medieperonligheders selvfremstilling" 2014)
Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Culture, and Director of the Ph.D. programme for Art, Literature and Cultural Studies, Aarhus University. He is co-editor of Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (2022) and is the author and co-author of articles and books on subjects such as unnatural narratives, early modernism, narrative rhetoric, the literature of testimony, interacting narratives and fictionality in public rhetoric (see e.g. "Nimble Navigation: Narrative, Fictionality, and Metanoic Reflexivity in Presidential Rhetoric" 2021, and "Disrupting Narrative Rhetoric. Experimental Fictionality on Digital Platforms" 2022 ).
Rikke Andersen Kraglund is Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. She has published articles on subjects such as intertextuality, intermediality and literary composition, and her current research includes character assassinations in Karl Ove Knausgaards My Struggle (see "‘But it hurts like I killed someone.’ Character assassinations around Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle" 2023). Furthermore, she is co-editor and co-author of Fiktionalitet (2013) and Satirisk fake news (2019) on the use of fictionality in media and the creation of fake news.
Simone Zetterberg-Nielsen is Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Her research includes fictionality in eighteenth-century novels, in particular the relationship between fictionality and facts in historical novels. She has published on fictionality as a theoretical concept and its relation to speech act theory. Together with Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, she has suggested a widely discussed and accepted definition of fictionality as “intentionally signaled invention in communication” (Distinguishing fictionality 2020). She is co-editor of Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (2022) and author of the chapter "The Novel" which aims to "bring together the rhetorical fictionality theory and insight from the historians of the novel. The chapter demonstrates how both strands of research are interested in contextualizing fictionality and share the assumption that fictionality has an existence outside of fictional genres." (The Novel). She has been awarded the 2023 Nils Klim prize for her research on fictionality and the history of the Danish novel.
Stefan Kjerkegaard is Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. In his own words, his "research in correlation to fictionality mainly deals with how literature (fiction) is changing when literature's way of communicating changes or conditions of this communication is changed due to an overall mediatization of literature. This mediatization, I would claim, changes a number of logics as we know them from much previous literature, e.g. in the form of authors' self-fashioning in relation to their literature (fiction and non-fiction) and this literature’s ways of using fiction, for instance within an autobiographical framework. Often the concept of fictionality instead of fiction is much more adequate and applicable if you want to analyze and describe what happens in recent works by for example J.M. Coetzee, Karl Ove Knausgård, Claus Beck-Nielsen, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Bret Easton Ellis, Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq etc."
Lasse Gammelgaard is Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. About his work on fictionality, he says: "Fictionality constitutes an important part of my research interests in different ways. My PhD-dissertation was on narrative poetry, and in this I - among other things - theorize about the poet’s relation to the speaker in the poem. Presently I’m interested in 1) fictionality in graphic memoir with its complex and multimodal way of intermingling fact and fiction and 2) the role of fictionality across many discourses in the 18th Century in general but with a specific focus on the literary production of Norwegian-Danish author Ludvig Holberg." Current research includes the relation between mental illness, creative writing and fiction (see e.g. "What Fiction Can Do for the Understanding of Mental Illness" 2022 and Skrivning og sundhed 2021). Furthermore, he is co-editor of Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (2022).
Tobias Skiveren is Associate Professor at Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Copenhagen University, and a former postdoc at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. In his own words, he is "working in the cross-section between postcritique, new materialism, and affect theory. I've written several books on (contemporary) Danish literature and published in journals like New Literary History, Environmental Humanities, Theory, Culture & Society, and Literature and Medicine. I’ve recently finalized a fully funded two-year project that dealt with the relationship between literature, the welfare state, and (ill-)health. In the coming years, I’ll be leading a three-year project that seeks to green Danish literary history and develop new learning designs for its implementation in upper-secondary school. The project is called “Environmental Literacy in L1 Education: Greening Danish Literary History” and includes a postdoc (Louise Bang) and three active L1 teachers."
Valdemar Pold is Ph.D. Student at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. His Ph.D. project focuses on the use of fictionality as a rhetorical strategy to communicate science in the Eighteenth-Century. He has published on the Danish philosopher Frederik Christian Eilschov's "Forsøg til en Fruentimmer" (see Fiktionalitet i F.C. Eilschovs Forsøg til en Fruentimmer-Philosophie: Introduktionen af en ny retorisk strategi i dansk videnskabelig kommunikation) and is co-editor of the 84th edition of Slagmark (Ekspertise og prognose).
Pernille Meyer is PhD student and Research Assistant at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Her PhD project concerns second-person narratives in Danish literature and draws on theoretical areas such as rhetorical fictionality theory and diachronic narratology. She has published in journals like Passage and Edda (see "Hvorfor fortælle dig noget, du allerede ved? Om dufortællinger i dansk litteratur" and "'Du kan ikke sende bevidstheden hjem. Kun tvivlsomt papir': Om brugen af 'du' i Cecil Bødkers selvbiografiske værk Salthandlerskens hus"). Also, she is co-editor of Dangers of Narrative and Fictionality: A Rhetorical Approach to Storytelling in Contemporary Western Culture (forthcoming) and author of the chapter "'Positioning You: Fictionality and Interpellation in Janne Teller's War: What If It Were Here?'".
Jeppe Lindquist Barnwell is a Ph.D. fellow at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Copenhagen University. He has published on Danish writer and museum inspector Peter Seeberg (Livet på listeform: Om Peter Seebergs sene kortprosa and Det store i det små: Peter Seebergs romaner, noveller og kortprosa). His Ph.D. project examines the interplay between Peter Seeberg's fictional and non-fictional works, and how fictionality plays an important role in Seeberg's historical and archaeological production.
Kristian Svane is a MA Student in Germanic Languages and Literatures at University of Hamburg. He is currently an exchange student and research assistant at Washington University in St. Louis.
