Research at the Department of Language, Culture, History and Communication.

The Center for American Studies is the oldest and largest such center in Denmark. Its creation was encouraged and supported by the Fulbright Commission. The core faculty, all of whom have also taught at American universities, focus their research entirely on the United States, serving as a focal point for others with related interests on the several campuses of the University of Southern Denmark and in the rest of Denmark. The Center offers a BA and MA degree, as well as a three-year PhD for selected students.

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The SDU Centre for Business History is a research center established by the University of Southern Denmark and the Danish Museum of Industry.

 

Researchers in the SDU Centre for Business History specialize in Danish business history since the 19th century. Theoretically, our research is guided by an interest in the history of capitalism, and in understanding how capitalism developed in Northern Europe and became an integral part of the Danish model.

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The Center for Cold War Studies was founded in 2006 with the aim of strengthening research within four main areas: Modern Military History, The Cultural History of the Cold War, Secret Service Activities and The History of Russia, Eastern and Central Europe. The Centre hosts a number of PhD students and researchers, offers seminars and conferences, and serves as a catalyst for the social debate.

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The Centre for Communication, Culture and Society aims to develop an interdisciplinary environment for research into sociolinguistic, social psychological and societal phenomena.

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The Research Centre for Computational & Organisational Cognition (CORG) aims at studying cognitive aspects in and around organisations.

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How does technology shape culture and how does culture shape technology? These are the key questions that determine research and activities at this center. The center is dedicated to the investigation of culture and technology by focusing on a plethora of topics that stem from experiences with technology, such as automatization, human-machine interaction, and AI.

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The CHI pursues a groundbreaking view of what it is to be human by drawing on synergies of what is best in Cognitive Science and the Humanities.

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The center is an interdisciplinary research center focusing on different aspects within the areas of L1 and L2 acquisition and use (including bilingualism and multilingualism) by both children and adults, and by typical and atypical populations.

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Centre for Medieval Literature (CML) is a Centre of Excellence founded in 2012 and funded for ten years by the Danish National Research Foundation, based at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense) and the University of York.

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Once founded as Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies 1983, the Center for Modern Middle East and Muslim Studies is today a multidisciplinary research center on the Modern Middle East and on Muslim majority and minority countries, as well as their transnational dynamics. The Center offers a two-year MA programme that is taught in English.

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At the Centre for Multimodal Communication we see multimodality as the study of the semiotic resources people use to communicate and the way they use these resources in concrete social settings.

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OPCs research concentrates on work-related communication and practice, often situated in wider societal and cultural contexts.

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The main focus of our research is how we reach a mutual understanding through social interactions. Thereby our research contributes to the research done on the Danish welfare society as it studies when and how we as individuals become included and take part in society by our linguistic and communicative competences.

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The Center for Uses of Literature (UoL) is interested in how literature is used in society and what we can use literature for. Using theoretical, hermeneutic and empirical methods, the Center's researchers examine the use of literature, especially in the context of health, welfare, ageing, class, work and gender.

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The Danish Centre for Welfare Studies (DaWS) was established in 2005 in cooperation between the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences at the University of Southern Denmark. The aim of DaWS is to enhance and coordinate welfare state research at the University of Southern Denmark.

DaWS is truly cross-disciplinary. Our group includes political scientists, economists, historians, literary scholars, and sociologists. DaWS also cooperates with scholars from public health, demography, and other disciplines.

DaWS researchers hold a broad portfolio of research projects and interest within the broad fields of political economy, comparative welfare research, and welfare state history. We are interested in fundamental questions such as the normative foundation of the welfare state and its development in a comparative and historical perspective, responses of the welfare state to external challenges, and the impact of welfare states on individuals.

DaWS is active academically in international cooperation and networks, and also contributes to public and political debates domestically.

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As we find ourselves on a planet on which little if anything has been left undisturbed by human activity, a growing number of critics are arguing that the division between nature and culture no longer makes any sense.

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The work of this research group focuses on analyses of how authority is generated, transformed, and challenged by means of material and aesthetic media. The research group is interested in the roles that material, visual, and textual (etc.) media play in the construction, maintenance, negotiation or struggles about authority in various historical contexts. Religious or other forms of authority may be negotiated and changed by means of alternative or new media, just as shifting technological and material conditions for the dissemination of media offer new frames for the use of authority or enable its insertion into new networks. Authority may also be ascribed to material artefacts or to particular types of media. Often an exchange or tension is visible between certain (often textual) media which are ascribed authority, and other media and types of materiality, which challenge and change sanctioned and authoritative media, or may be used to challenge and change other forms of authority.

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The research group Culture and Affects of Science in Humanities (CASH) explores and examines the cultures, materialisms, narratives, affects and histories of science and technologies and its embodied effects in its pasts, presents and futures. It takes seriously the deep entanglement of human perception and science, and the group arose amidst contemporary cultural anxieties about sciences as both the root of ecological and human destruction as well as the hope and promise of natural and human resurrection.

While we study how science has come to form the world, as we know it and how the present world of increased technologization and intensified globalism exposes and recalibrates the human condition in the world, CASH insists ‘that something is at stake in Cultural Studies’.

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Current phenomena such as “fake news” and the idea of “alternative facts” indicate a change in the general conception of factuality. The strict barrier between fact and fiction that was a product of nineteenth-century historicism appears to be disintegrating, at least outside of academia. Where does that leave the historical sciences? At the same time, historical scholars’ necessarily retrospective approach to the world we live in does not sit comfortably with public expectations that research present quick solutions to pressing societal and cultural problems. Across academic disciplines, the historical perspective risks being marginalised. The research group addresses both these important challenges through practical analyses of a broad selection of cultural phenomena from the recent and distant past as well as through theoretical discussions of cultural historical methods.

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Warfare and its representations constitute a fixture of human civilization and history. Why is war such an intrinsic marker of civilization? From the Ancient Egyptian conflicts, the religious crusades of the Modern Age, the social and national revolutions of eighteenth- and nineteenth century, the American Civil War, the World Wars, the Vietnam War to the current conflicts in Syria, wars are ever present within the history of human kind. Why is war such an intrinsic marker of civilization? What are the anthropological conditions of human aggression? And how does war reconfigure the basic categories through which we understand the world?

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The research programme Cultural Encounters is an interdisciplinary forum for faculty members at the Department of History. The forum provides a platform for the exchange of ideas and research outcomes aiming at mutual inspiration for all interested. The group meets during the semester for presentations, talks and discussions either by group members or colleagues from other universities in the country or abroad. We also meet to read and engage in critical discussion of group members’ manuscripts. The members of the cultural encounters group belong at the following centres and fields of study: History, American Studies, Middle East Studies, Classical Studies and Religion.

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Political history has traditionally been a central concern of historical scholarship and remain a focal interest at the Department of History. We work with a broad approach to political history. Political history is about more than stories of great events or tales of iconic figures. It is also about processes of structural change, and about how politics has affected ordinary people’s everyday lives. We are therefore not only interested in politics as something that happens in formal institutions; we are also interested in understanding “the political” in a broader sense, including what forms “the political” takes in different contexts and how it relates to other spheres. The department’s research on political history addresses major themes such as war, climate, capitalism, colonialism, states, democracy, culture, and families, and everything in between. We work with many periods, but chronologically the main focus is on modern and contemporary history. Geographically, we have specialists in several areas, from local history to Danish history, to Nordic, European, American, British, and international history.

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TRILO (Team Research in Innovation, Leadership and Organization) is a research group at the University of Southern Denmark especially connected to International Business Communication studies.

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UAL carries out literary and more broadly aesthetic research aiming both to develop new interdisciplinary methods for analyzing, and indeed to analyze the social dimensions of art and literature. The group’s foundation is in literary studies but we also work on and aim to include art, film, television and other aesthetic media forms in our research in order to leave behind a narrow view of literature and instead investigate how these art forms are mutually entangled.

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The ACE-Lab is a hub for state of the art research where empirical approaches to organisational cognition, action and communication are investigated and developed.

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Ameri-Danes (or "Amerikansk på dansk") is a research project on Americanization processes in Denmark in the years 1945-1975. The project focuses on the interplay between culture, consumption, business, and politics.

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Licensee: Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Period: 2020-2025

What is the interaction of factual and fictitious crisis communication? How does this trigger fear and deterrence concepts? To answer these questions, the EU-funded CODE project will study crisis communication from the Cold War to the War on Terror and beyond. It will investigate the chain of operations in politics and discuss how media become political. The project will show how both factual and fictitious channels of communication characterise the Cold War as a conflict determined by actual events and political concepts as well as fictions of nuclear war. Today, in fiction, it is the networked hotline that must protect itself from attacks. In real life, digital diplomacy emerges along with the establishment of new media.

Corpus-Based Multimedia Analysis is a communication, digital data and computation research group at the Institute of Language and Communication, USD.

The group is a principal member of the Red Hen distributed laboratory for research on multimodal communication.

The group maintains Troll Denmark, a satellite capture station which records for the Communication Studies Achive at UCLA news from the main TV networks in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

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Danish Civil Defence: Cultures of Fear and Survival during the Cold War (DACIDE) provides the first comprehensive study of Cold War CD in Denmark.

Advancing both Danish Cold War history and the thriving, international field of nuclear studies, the project develops a novel theoretical framework that emphasises the political, cultural and ideological dimensions of CD and which facilitates international comparison.

Two subprojects chart the development of Danish CD during the early and later period (1945-1965, 1963-1989) and examine how this system was conceived, communicated, constructed, legitimised and criticised in text, visual media and material artefacts.

This analysis – attentive to transnational dynamics and the compatibility or dissonance of CD with conceptions of statehood, citizenship or national purpose – enables a comparative study of national civil defence histories in the West during the Cold War.

 

DACIDE is financed by Independent Research Fund Denmark, Humanities, as a so-called Research Project I.

The Project runs from September 2018 to December 2020. 

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Licensee: Anne-Marie Mai

Period: 2021-2025

The research group:
Professor Anne-Marie Mai, IKV. 
Associate Professor Anders Juhl Rasmussen, IKV.
Professor Anette Søgaard Nielsen, KI.
PhD-student Johanne Kragh Hansen, KI.

The ambition of DECIDE  is to reduce death and disease from alcohol-related and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We will do this by combining clinical research with interdisciplinary efforts from basic science, narrative medicine and patient involvement. The goal is to aid the physicians’ decisions about their patients by providing accurate, efficient and easily interpretable tests and to aid patients’ decisions about their own health and well-being, in the understanding that human health encompasses much more than laboratory tests. Fatty liver disease from alcohol, obesity and type 2 diabetes is present in 25% of the population and each year causes 3.3 million deaths worldwide. Despite this, we still lack accurate decision tools that can be used in primary care to diagnose and monitor people at risk of developing life-threatening liver complications. We will therefore conduct a longitudinal study of 5,500 people designed to develop and validate such tests.”

Drones are in the air. The production of civilian drones for rescue, surveillance, transport, and leisure is booming. The Danish government proclaimed research on civilian drones a national strategy in 2016. Accordingly, research institutions as well as the industry focus on the development, usage, and promotion of drone technology. These efforts often prioritize commercialization and engineering, as well as setting-up UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) test centers. Frequently ignored in these initiatives are questions about the impact of this technology on our identity as humans and its effects on human communities. Our research addresses these questions from a humanities’ point of view by investigating aesthetic representations of civilian and military drones in visual arts, literature, and architecture. We call these aesthetic representations the “drone imaginary,” a cultural storage of images and narratives about drone technology.

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The project EQaB theorises a new approach to the complex relationship linking education, the Qur’an, and the Bible. Despite being a rationale of many religious texts, this relationship has been neglected in both Qur’anic studies and the Study of Religion. Based on a theoretical complex joining historical, system-theoretical, and cultural-evolutionary perspectives, we remedy this situation by exploring the concept of "educational normativity" in the Qur’an itself and in the comparison between the Qur’an and the Bible. Our conceptualisation of religion and education not only provides a much-needed theoretical foundation for discerning historical developments regarding this pairing, but also offers nuance to fundamental issues concerning the relation between the Qur'an and the Bible, the figure of Muhammad as a teacher similar to Moses and Jesus, and the intertwinement of Islam and other religions.

The project is part of the Inge Lehmann Programme funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and runs from 2022-2024. 

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Grant holder: Emily Hogg

Period: 2021-2024

In recent years, theorists have frequently described contemporary global labour conditions as “feminized”, meaning that the experiences and practices once primarily associated with women workers are becoming the standard for the labour market in general. Meanwhile, in twentieth-century anglophone literature, conventional forms of women’s work (including housework, emotional labour, and service work) are frequently explored through both form and content. This project therefore situates twentieth century literary texts which engage with women’s work in relation to contemporary theorizations of feminization. It reads literature transhistorically, to show that the archive of twentieth-century literary representations of “women’s work” are a rich, as-yet untapped resource for understanding the major trend towards feminization in the twenty-first century work world. Moreover, it contributes to theorizations of contemporary feminized labour through critical analysis of the rhetorical strategies, narrative structures, and images used to depict women’s work in 20th century anglophone literature.

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The American Civil War (1861-1865) cost more than 700,000 lives, emancipated four million slaves, established an industrial ‘great power,’ and revealed global transnational ties – including ties to Denmark.

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Grant holder: Camilla Schwartz

Period: 2021-2023

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Grant holder: Rune Graulund

Period: 2020-2022

What

In a world governed by rising temperatures, uncontrollable wildfires, decade long droughts and extreme weather, the image of a future desert planet is evoked on a routine basis. Hypothesizing that the notion of 'future desert' acts as one of two master tropes of the Anthropocene (the other being the flood), the monograph Future Desert: Wasteland Imaginaries of the Anthropocene will therefore explore the cultural significance of the desert in imagined futures of catastrophic collapse caused by anthropogenic change. The central research question is thus: if 'the Anthropocene itself can usefully be understood as a science fiction trope', how and why has the image of a 'future desert' come to stand as a trope for anthropogenic change in general and for global warming in particular?

Why

The monograph will build its methodological foundations on Elizabeth DeLoughrey's recent decolonial/ecologist work on 'allegory' as being 'the fundamental rhetorical mode for figuring the planet as well as the historical rift between part and whole that is symbolized by the Anthropocene'. In addition to this, the intersection of science fiction studies with disaster studies through imaginaries of worst case scenarios is significant, as is the manner in which 'science fiction infuses science and vice versa' through futurist projections of present and potential technologies and their latent dystopian/utopian outcomes.

How

While literary in nature in its focus on narrative and allegory, the project is willfully eclectic in its selection of 'texts' analyzed. Including examples from literature over film, computer games, journalism, photography and fine arts that employ 'future desert' imagery in order to conceptualize forms of potential planetary catastrophic collapse, the monograph will offer a comprehensive analysis of a multi-generic corpus of material that covers a wide range of scenarios of catastrophic anthropogenic change, e.g. global warming, nuclear warfare, pollution, or deforestation.

SSR

The monograph will offer a much-needed revision of the idea of the desert as more than a void space in the colonial and imperialist periphery, and rather as a central trope for future regional as well as planetary collapse. Second, the monograph will specifically enrich a growing and urgently needed Anthropocene vocabulary, as well as more generally raise awareness into the importance of narrative and allegory in environmental discourse.

 

The ideal of the godly state developed during the 16th century. A part of being a godly Christian ruler included eradicating sin and all false Christians. Witches were the epitome of false Christians. This project will explore to what extent witch prosecutions were included in the efforts of establishing a godly Danish monarchy during 1559-1660. The Danish State with its realms were ruled by the Oldenburg monarchs. It encompassed the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway (including territories in present day Sweden), present day Iceland, and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. These realms had separate jurisdictions and varying degrees of self-determination, but state authorities could issue strict laws against witchcraft. Common to these realms, lay rulers oversaw witch prosecutions. Based on four intertwined subprojects, the overall aim of this project is to clarify the responsibilities of the king, the Council, the king’s lieutenants, and the parish priests, and how these groups engaged in trials for witchcraft.      

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Hans Christian Andersen is world famous. But he is understood and used in many ways around the world, and that raises questions. Why, for instance, did Mao Zedong include “The Little Match Girl” in the Chinese primary school curriculum? Why did Disney rewrite the ending of “The Little Mermaid” in the 1989 animated movie? And how did a Danish fairy tale writer from the 19th century become global cultural heritage to begin with? It seems that Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in translations and adaptations are modified in accordance with local cultural values, which goes against a general assumption that the fairy tales are internationally valued for their universal themes. From the earliest translations to current adaptations of the fairy tales, “Hans Christian Andersen as World Literature” examines how Denmark’s best-known author achieved global ubiquity. What cultural and linguistic characteristics disappeared in the first translations of the fairy tales into European languages, and how has the resulting openness facilitated a transnational transmission of the authorship where it could be invested with new meanings in new cultural contexts? Theoretical perspectives from the fields of World Literature and Cultural Studies can help us answer this by combining linguistic, aesthetic, historical and sociological perspectives. Focusing on Andersen’s initial fame in Europe and subsequent popularization in North America and Asia, the project will produce new perspectives on Denmark’s national poet which can also create relevant results for international research in World Literature. 

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Grant holder: Ane Grum-Schwensen

Period: 2020-2025

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Since 1966 Danish scholars and students from the universities of Aarhus, Southern Denmark and Copenhagen have done archaeological research in the ancient city of Halikarnassos in south-western Asia Minor in cooperation with the Turkish authorities.

The first part of the project (1966-2004) was carried out under the auspices of the University of Aarhus and focused on the excavation and study of the remains of the Maussolleion at Halikarnassos, which is famous as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The second part of the project started in 1990 under the auspices of the University of Southern Denmark and has been carried out in close cooperation with the Archaeological Museum of Bodrum. In this second phase focus has been on the city of Halikarnassos – temples and monuments, daily life and history of this large city, the capital of Karia. Future work is planned in cooperation between the Universities of Aarhus and Southern Denmark.

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Grant holder: Nils Gunder Hansen

Period: 2022

The increasing opposition between academic approaches to historical knowledge and competing (propagandistic, creative, popular) visions of the past suggests the very idea of what is ‘historical’ to be undergoing significant transformation.

Yet, standing in the middle of such a process, it can be hard to estimate its final outcome. In order to understand the current challenging of the historical paradigme we therefore need to go back to the roots: the aesthetic-historical culture that flourished in Europe between 1550 and 1650. The developments of those hundred years in historiography and theory of history determined modern historical method and the modern concept of historical factuality. Yet, the culture from which these developments sprang amalgamated fact and fiction in ways we would today consider problematic.

HISTORIES investigates this greyzone backdrop of the emergence of the historical paradigm, testing the claim that the multiple hybrids between aesthetics and historiography which came into being 1550-1650, historical drama in particular, were not the fabulous other of the progressing culture of facts, but vital to the emergence of modern—critical, reflective—attitudes toward history.

Thus, the project highlights the problem-oriented, audience-involving approaches to history developed in a range of European contexts at the dawn of the modern period as an alternative modern historiographical paradigm with relevant perspectives for rethinking historism.

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What

The project investigates the late Renaissance backdrop of the modern historical paradigm with special emphasis on historical drama, the contribution of which to transformations in the ways history was perceived and written has gone largely unrecognized. It hypothesizes that the epistemologically complex aesthetic-historical culture that flourished all over Europe between 1550 and 1650 and eminently in Spain — a major political, intellectual and cultural player on the contemporaneous international scene – was key in the development of modern ideas about history. And that historical drama was at the centre of this culture.

Why

The project is spurred on by current anti-historist tendencies - alternative facts, fake news - which it aims to put into historical perspective. Returning to the roots of our modern ideas about history and revisiting the cradle of the modern historical paradigm, the project suggests that one answer to the present epistemological crisis could be a reflective, problem-oriented approach to historical knowledge and historical truth like the one found in the examined historical materials – an approach which represented a fruitful merger of aesthetics and historiography, as opposed to the current blurring of the line between fiction and fact.

How

I will write a monograph on the rise of historical drama and modern historical consciousness in Golden Age Spain. Whereas many scholars have discussed the alliance between aesthetics and historiography during this period of artistic glorification of monarchs and dynasties, assessment of the role played by aesthetics in the formation of modern ideas about history in Golden Age Spain is lacking. The monograph will provide such an assessment.

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Grant holder: Charlotte Kroløkke

Period: 2020-2022

Political and Cultural Spaces of Communication in the Eras of Reaction and Scandinavism.

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Grant holder: Karen Hvidtfeldt

Periode: 2022-2024

The project explores how everyday cultures and perceptions of middle age men’s bodies unfold when masculinity is increasingly both mediatized and medicalized. Today large parts of intimate life, health and social relations have become mediatized: Bodies are monitored using mobile apps, communities are formed on social media, and intimate questions are increasingly the topic of TV-shows and intensified in online campaigns.

We define middle age as the life period between youth and old age (40 to 65 years) and the project embraces both urban and provincial masculinity as well as heterosexual, homosexual and transgendered men. Medicine Man is based on a theoretical framework of somatechnics and assemblage theory.

The project considers medicalization as a cultural phenomenon, which emerges inseparably from contemporary media, and thus adds humanistic research to health and social sciences about how mediatized culture shapes the body and its medicalized interventions and how notions of beauty, sexuality and health unfolds.

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The Modern Muslim Subjectivities Project (MMSP) provides the joint framework for a number of collective and individual research projects that have been conducted at the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies since 2013.

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Narrative medicine is a growing field of research and education. The vision is that narrative medicine becomes an integral part of the Danish healthcare system with University of Southern Denmark as the leading site for development of innovative forms of health promotion, diagnostics, treatment, rehabilitation and palliative care, education activities as well as international research collaboration and network.

Narrative medicine thus aims to be a crucial contribution to answering the complex societal challenges in the development of a person-centered healthcare system.

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The research programme “Neoliberalism in the Nordics: developing an absent theme” intends to develop an understanding of neoliberalism in the Nordic welfare states, and specifically, of the role of the welfare state and a set of political alliances surrounding and including social democracy, not merely as the targets of neoliberal critique but as the vehicles of a specific Nordic variant of neoliberalism.

The programme leader is Jenny Andersson, Department of Science and History of Ideas, Uppsala University, and it incorporates researchers from 8 Nordic universities for a period of six years.

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Grant holder: Moritz Schramm

Period: 2022-2023

Grant holder: Søren Blak Hjortshøj

Period: 2021-2023

Grant holder: Lucie Duggan

Period: 2022-2024

This project studies the unique private library of the early modern Danish noblewoman and book collector Karen Brahe (1657-1736) to reveal the contours of female book ownership and collecting practices in early modern Denmark. The project departs from the following research question: What did early modern Danish women read?

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Grant holder: Jon Helt Haarder

Period: 2021-2025

The digital resemiotisation of buying and selling interaction

Every year Danes break records in online shopping, but is it actually easier to shop online than offline? What are the similarities and differences between online and offline shopping? These are some of the questions RESEMINA aims to answer over the coming years.

The Digital Resemiotisation of Buying and Selling Interaction, shortened RESEMINA, is a VELUX funded research project investigating how shopping in physical stores is translated into a digital experience online.

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Retracing connections: Byzantine Storyworlds in Greek, Arabic, Georgian, and Old Slavonic (c. 950 – c. 1100) is a long-term international, interdisciplinary research programme funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and administered by Uppsala University, in collaboration with the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and the University of Southern Denmark. Through the work on narrative materials in four medieval languages, the programme will produce new methodological and technical tools, as well as critical editions and databases to help scholars approach stories that traveled between premodern languages and cultures.

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Grant holder: Anne Klara Bom

Period: 2021-2023

From the margins to the Self

The 13th and 14th centuries show an increased awareness of the mechanisms underlying literary creation. Shifting notions of authorship, with an emphasis on the representation of the subject in the text, are integral to a large-scale process involving both Latin and vernacular literatures across Europe. The emergence of self-commentaries, i.e. commentaries penned by the authors themselves on their own works and designed for publication, is regarded as the result of such new awareness. Dante’s Vita Nova and Convivio, Bocaccio’s Teseida or Gower’s Confessio Amantis stand out, but the phenomenon is found widely across Europe and beyond, from the Middle-East to the Netherlands. What is more, it is a phenomenon that starts way before the 13th century in the broader Mediterranean area. This project will therefore re-assess the rise of auto-commentaries in Medieval Europe, with a new emphasis on transnational, diachronic and socio-material factors, challenging current dominating narratives on authorship and the self in late medieval Europe.

The project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

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Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan. This is certainly true of the Second Schleswig War. All political parties in Denmark washed their hands and blamed their political opponent or foreign powers. The aim of this project is to explore the political narratives that they created and how they have affected Danish politics, historiography, art, and national identity in the last 150 years.

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Grant holder: Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Period: 2018-2022

Since the turn of the century, fictions have increasingly been used as tools of war.Imagined scenarios and virtual worlds now shape how wars are prepared, waged, and processed. The military has thereby co-opted a field rarely associated with warfare - the field of aesthetics. Various concepts that traditionally belong to the theory of art and representation, have migrated into the military sphere. Thus notions of fictionality, experience, realism, the suspension of disbelief have become key to warfare today.At the same time, artworks have themselves reacted to the militarization of aesthetics.

To understand this merger of warfare and aesthetics we need a new theoretical perspective. While the recent and ongoing wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Syria have led numerous scholars to reflect anew on what a humanistic approach may offer for the study of war, a basic aesthetic framework is lacking. Uniting scholars from the main disciplines in the arts - literature, theater, film, and visual art - this research project aims to build it.

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Our project “The Arctic Muslim” aims at taking the study of Islam in the West in new directions. This applies in particular with regard to the current focus of this field of research on the construction of pietistic and Salafi Muslim identities in the metropolitan areas of Europe and North America. Empirically, we explore the role of Islamic traditions in the subjectivity formation of contemporary Muslims in the socially and ecologically distinct environment of Arctic towns in Norway and Canada. Theoretically, we take up discussions on the historicity of religious concepts and the study of religion as everyday practice. To these theories the Arctic adds a novel analytical prism through which we can expand and critically reflect upon our understanding of the modern interpretation of Islamic traditions. How do Muslims in Arctic environments practice Islam in everyday life? In which ways do they negotiate their religious subject positions under the condition of remoteness in Arctic Norway and Canada? Answering these questions, we want to make original contributions to core debates at the disciplinary crossroads of Islamic and Religious Studies. The project is part of the research programme on Modern Muslim Subjectivities that has been directed by Dietrich Jung at the Center for Modern Middle East and Muslim Studies since 2013 and which has received external funding from Denmark’s Independent Research Fund, the VELUX Foundation and Carlsberg Foundation. The new Arctic Muslim project also received funding by the Independent Research Fund for the Humanities in Denmark and it will run from 1 August 2022 to 31 July 2025.

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Focused on emotions and narrativity, the Total Devotion project theorizes and operationalizes a new approach to, and a historization of, the study of radical religion. We analyse the emergence and forms of radical and intense religious devotion in ancient Jewish and Christian religious traditions before the advent of Islam, within the comparative context of ancient religions. We hypothesize that concentrating on emotions and narrative can help explain the “pull” and the intensity of involvement in radical religion in more depth, and that these foundational traditions will help us historicize total devotion passion plots and trace the key trajectories of development. Understanding emotional involvement in total devotion is a burning issue for the study of religions as well as for contemporary societies. The project analyses religious narratives that idealize total devotion and narrativize an all-encompassing emotional commitment in the era from ca. 520 BCE-450 CE.

The project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

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VISL is a research and development project at the Institute of Language and Communication (ISK), University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Since September 1996, staff and students at ISK have been designing and implementing Internet-based grammar tools for education and research.

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Urbanisation, provincialisation and cultural interaction in Roman Anatolia

This is an interdisciplinary, collective project aiming to investigate how a polycultural society combining Phrygian, Iranian, and Hellenic elements was absorbed into the Roman Empire. The project will integrate history, geography, philology, epigraphy, archaeology, and numismatics and involve researchers from the University of Southern Denmark (Kolding and Odense) and the University of Copenhagen in partnership with the Nerik project of the Free University of Berlin.

The project will be financed by the Danish Council for Independent Research and the participating universities and directed by Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen, Institute of History, University of Southern Denmark.

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Hate speech has become an increasing problem for social media platforms and there is a need for more research, especially in relation to languages other than English. The XPEROHS project, co-funded by the Velux Foundations and the Department of Language and Communication (2018-2021), seeks to investigate how hate speech is expressed in Danish and German on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Using corpus linguistic techniques, we will create a database to help reveal the extent and nature of online hate speech. The aim is to identify differing degrees of hate speech, from the more direct to the more implicit. Using physiological and neurological measurements, we will investigate how hate speech is perceived by differing groups in society. The experimental measures will be supported by questionnaires and interviews. Comparisons between Danish and German will allow us to identify any shared features in the expression and normative perceptions of hate speech across languages and cultures.

 

For more information see CCCS webpage

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The principal aim of the network is to change how Cassius Dio – one of the key historians of ancient Rome – is perceived: from a historian sometimes judged mediocre to a politician and intellectual steeped in Roman history and historiography. This reassessment will rest on deeper study of his narrative technique, his relationship with traditions of universal and more Rome-based historiography, and his structural approach to Roman history.

The network is a joint venture between the University of Southern Denmark, Aarhus University, and Aalborg University, in cooperation with University of Alberta and Georgetown University. The Network is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF), Humanities (FKK), Georgetown University, and the University of Alberta.

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The three hundred year period between 1650 and 1950 traces the emergence, diversification, and developing hegemony of the town in the history of Europe. As places which fostered and disseminated key social, economic, political and cultural developments, towns were central to the creation of gendered identities and the transmission of ideas across local, national and transnational boundaries.

This network of established and postgraduate historians from thirteen countries is examining the ways that the European urban experience was gendered over time and across borders, and their research and subsequent publications will revolve around the operation of gender in three distinct, but interrelated, areas of urban study: the economic, the political (particularly political culture) and the spatial. These three central themes speak directly to newer ideas of exploring the dynamics of culture – both as definition and as practice.

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Network for Digital Literary Studies unites people from four Danish research institutions and is directed by associate professor Sofie Kluge, IKV.

In the field of literary studies, digitalization presents a whole array of exciting new scientific perspectives. Firstly, it famously possibilitates analysis of larger text corpora; secondly, it makes possible the analysis of literary texts in a broader cultural field to which social media, among other forms of communication, also belong; finally, it has clear pedagogic and communicative advantages. Yet, although earlier skepticism has today been broadly replaced by interest in the possibilities that digital methods and tools open up in literary research, Danish literary scholars have not systematically pursued these possibilites nor has the potential of digitalization to transform traditional literary scholarship been fulfilled. Much less do existing digital tools and ressources reach students of literature at Danish universities.

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