Malene Breunig is an associate professor at the Department of Culture and Language Studies at SDU. She holds a Cand.mag. in Nordic Studies and Humanities Design Studies from SDU and received her PhD in 2007 with a dissertation on intimacy in Danish literature and visual art around the year 1900.
As a researcher and educator, Malene Breunig empirically engages with Nordic literature, visual art, design, and architecture, with a focus particularly on 20th-century domestic culture, understandings of modernity, and regionalism. Her publications include studies on:
• The domestication of modernity in Danish/Nordic functionalism
• Ideas about privacy and intimacy in 20th-century cultural history
• Nordic welfare aesthetics and the architectural theoretical concept of ‘critical regionalism’
Currently, Malene Breunig is working on narratives about the Nordic region as a kind of humanitarian superpower. She explores how the self-image of being a morally superior region is both conditioned and challenged by geopolitical tensions, as well as how this self-image has acquired a specific aesthetic expression and functions as part of a regional branding strategy.
