University of Gothenburg
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Elisabeth Hjorth

Professor

The Film, Photography and Literary Composition
Unit
Telephone
+46 31-786 29 67
Mail
elisabeth.hjorth@gu.se
Visiting address
Storgatan 43
Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

About Elisabeth Hjorth

Elisabeth Hjorth is a writer, critic, PhD in Ethics and professor in literary composition. She works in parallel with her literary authorship and artistic research. Her books have been awarded several literary prizes and she has worked as a writing teacher at Biskops Arnö, Konstfack and Linnaeus University. At HDK-Valand, she is the director of the master programme in literary composition. She is also involved in research ethics and is a member of the Ethics Committee at the University of Gothenburg.

The relationship between power and language is central to her research. In her thesis Desperate Readings. Literature as resistance and reading as ethics (2015), she explored how reading the marginalized and silenced can be understood as an ethical practice. By introducing Gayatri Spivak as an ethicist and conducting thematic readings of contemporary Swedish literature, she examined responsibility and resistance as literary aspects and its relation to politics and ethics.

The research project "The Double Bind. The novel as (peace)negotioation" resulted in the novel Fadern (2018) and the essay Mutant (2021). This project revolves around female autobiography, violence and shame in relation to writing (in conversation with Adriana Cavarero, Chris Krauss, Simone Weil, Marina Abramovic and others).

Since 2022, Elisabeth Hjorth is project leader for an interdisciplinary research project, “Autistic writing: Autistic Writing: reloading, reclaiming another mother tongue”. The research project aims to investigate autistic experiences, autism-led research, neuro-mixed rooms and autistic poetics. A writing course in the project is the basis for an investigation of neurodiversity and pedagogy in art education. She is also involved in research on writing/motherhood/trauma within The Story Lab, Lund University.

Research interests: neurodiversity, poetics, feminism, motherhood, language/power, micro- and macro narrations, the novel as permeable genre, postcolonial theory, the essay as form and (self)performance.