University of Hamburg - to research, to teach, to educate and form, to homepage
DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Dr. Johanne Gormsen Schmidt

Curriculum

Johanne Gormsen Schmidt is a literary scholar. She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen and earned her PhD in Nordic Literature from the University of Southern Denmark in 2020. Her revised dissertation will be published as I DET SMÅ: En ny dansk litteraturhistorie set gennem et lille forlag [IN THE SMALL: A New Danish Literary History Seen Through a Small Press] (Hellerup: Spring, 2025). Her research focuses on contemporary Nordic literature, modernism, ecocriticism, literature and theology, and literary sociology – particularly reading cultures, the publishing industry, and translation studies. She co-authored Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) with Ben Davies and Christina Lupton, written during a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. As a member of Bogpanelet [The Book Panel] under the Danish Ministry of Culture, she advises on book market developments and contributes to public debate on literary culture and cultural policy. She recently completed a postdoc at the Nordic Humanities Center, University of Southern Denmark, researching large animals in Nordic fiction and conservation debates. This forms the basis of her forthcoming book Udsat natur [Exposed Nature] (Copenhagen: Gad/Nord Academic, 2026). From April 2026, she will be assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen and a fellow on Grey Matters: Ecocritical Potentials of Lithic Aesthetics (PI Stefanie Heine), revisiting the modernist tradition in relation to inorganic matter. She is editor at the literary journal Passage.

Publications (selection)

  • Udsat natur [Exposed Nature] (forthcoming ultimo 2025/early 2026). Copenhagen: Nord Academic/Gad.
  • I DET SMÅ: En ny dansk litteraturhistorie 2000-2020 set gennem et lille forlag [IN THE SMALL: A New Danish Literary History 2000-2020 Seen Through a Small Press] (in press, forthcoming 2025). Hellerup: Spring.
  • “’Man kan drømme om at keruberne findes’: Melanie Kittis Halvt urne, halvt gral i lyset af den modernistiske tradition” [’One Can Dream That the Cherubs Exist’: Melanie Kitti’s Half Urn, Half Grail in Light of the Modernist Tradition] (2024). Spring 53, pp. 6-31.
  • Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (2022). With Ben Davies and Christina Lupton. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • “Robert Walser’s Topicality and the Descriptive Turn” (2019). On_Culture 7.

Research project: Troubling Animal Forces Across Modernist and Contemporary Literature

Bridging my recent research on large animals in contemporary Nordic literature with an upcoming project on modernism’s underexplored engagement with the lithosphere, my work as a senior fellow at the DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Imaginarien der Kraft will explore echoes of modernist aesthetics in contemporary literature – including a recurrent preoccupation with the ways animals are bound up with an intriguing kind of force or power. Modernism is frequently associated with interiority and abstraction, yet it also reveals a sustained – though often overlooked – engagement with the physical and animal world, responding not only to mechanization, urbanization, and industrial modernity, but also to forces that extend beyond the man-made. While both ecocritical scholarship and contemporary literature have long drawn on Romanticism, there are growing signs of renewed interest in modernism. What is the relevance of the modernist tradition and its animals – often foregrounding disturbing, vitalist, dark, or elusive forces—for contemporary writers? And how might this legacy inform today’s literary engagements with urgent questions of human–environment relations?

Research results: Troubling Animal Forces Across Modernist and Contemporary Literature

My project takes as its starting point the increasing centrality of animals as a motif in contemporary literature in recent years and a broader intensification of attention to ecological conditions and debates on nature management in a Scandinavian context. Within this field, the concept of force has proven exceptionally fruitful as an analytical perspective. The return of large animals to contemporary landscapes – through rewilding projects or as a consequence of their legal status as protected species – reactivates ancient myths and persistent cultural imaginaries that take on the status as forces with concrete political significance for nature conservation debates and environmental management. A horse, for instance, possesses a force of its own, but so too do the emotional imaginaries through which we, as a culture, understand our relationship with it.

During my months at the DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Imaginarien der Kraft, I pursued a closer investigation of the darker and more unsettling forms of force associated with animals in contemporary Nordic literature. In several cases, these representations reveal literary-historical continuities extending back a century to literary tendencies at the turn of the twentieth century. I found that these connections are often, more specifically, linked to religious or theological frameworks that have become increasingly visible in contemporary literature. The animal becomes a powerful nexus where ecological concerns and religious imaginaries converge. Sacrifice in particular constitutes a prominent and productive motif, combining animal and theological dimensions, and one that several contemporary Scandinavian authors have explored within an ecocritical context. I analyze this motif in the recent works of fiction by Kerstin Ekman and Charlotte Weitze. The research findings will be presented in a forthcoming article, the first draft of which is currently under review.