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Dr. Anna Westerståhl Stenport

Director of Scandinavian Studies, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Comparative and World Literature
Gender and Women's Studies
LAS Global Studies
Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies
Associate Professor of Theatre

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Contact Information:

  • Address:
    3109 FLB
    707 S Mathews Avenue
    Urbana, IL 61801
    • Office Hours:
    • On sabbatical and off campus through July 2012.
  • Telephone: 217 721 5697
  • Email:

Education

Ph.D University of California, Berkeley

Specializations / Research Interests

Modern Scandinavian culture, film, literature, and drama.

Distinctions / Awards

Biography

Anna Westerståhl Stenport is a native of Sweden's Göteborg and holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Uppsala University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (2004). Before joining the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Dr. Stenport taught Comparative Literature and Scandinavian Studies at UC Berkeley; she has also studied at the University of Georga in Athens, GA, and has lived in Victoria, B.C., Canada. Anna is an Affiliate Associate Professor [Docent] at Gothenburg University, Sweden and a Visiting Associate Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow in the Europe Center at Stanford University 2011-12. Her research has been supported by the American Scandinavian Foundation, The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, the Sweden-America Foundation, the Rotary Foundation, the European Commission, the University of Illinois Research Board, CIBER, the European Union Center, and numerous Swedish foundations and agencies.

Anna's academic research and teaching is currently directed along two tracks. One emphasizes contemporary media culture in the Nordic region, including film production and industry aspects. Her book on contemporary Swedish film director Lukas Moodysson will be published in the University of Washington Nordic Film Classics series (forthcoming 2012). Another research track bridges European economic history and cultural studies with the writing of August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and their contemporaries. Her book Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting is published with the University of Toronto Press (2010) and she is preparing an edited volume called "The International Strindberg/Strindberg Beyond the Borders of Sweden" for publication with Northwestern University Press (forthcoming 2012). She has also co-edited a volume of scholarship on Strindberg and gender theory: Det gäckande könet: Strindberg och genusteori (Symposion 2006).

Anna teaches courses on Scandinavian and European literature, film, culture, and drama; she has also taught courses on Crime Fiction, European decadence, German film, Old Norse prose narration, American Cultures, and post-colonial and feminist theory.

Recently, Anna was featured live on NPR, in the nationally broadcasted The Diane Rehm Show. There she participated in a panel on Stieg Larsson's best-seller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Click here to listen.

Publications

Books

Book Contributions

  • "Corporations, the Welfare State, and Covert Misogyny in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Co-written with Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm." Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Feminist Perspectives on Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy. Nashville. Forthcoming. : Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.
  • Stenport, Anna W. "Introduction." Introduction. Selected Plays of August Strindberg. Minneapolis. New Edition. Forthcoming: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
  • "Money Metaphors and Rhetoric of Resource Depletion: Creditors and Late Nineteenth-Century European Economics." The International Strindberg/Strindberg Beyond the Borders of Sweden. Evanston, IL. Forthcoming.: Northwestern University Press, 2012.
  • "Introduction." The International Strindberg/Strindberg Beyond the Borders of Sweden. Evanston, IL. Forthcoming.: Northwestern University Press, 2012.
  • "Scandinavian Modernism: Stories of the Transnational and the Discontinuous.." The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms.. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • ""Memfis Film: Local and Global"." Swedish Film: An Introduction and a Reader. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2010.
  • "Inledning. Från kvinnohat till maskulinitetskris: Strindberg som genuskonstruktion.." Introduction. Det gäckande könet: Strindberg och genusteori (The Elusive Gender: Strindberg and Gender Theory). Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 2006.
  • "Writing the City: Women Novelists, Gendered Spatiality, and Authoritative Voice in Early Twentieth-Century Stockholm.." Gender and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Scandinavia.. Norwich, UK: Norvik, 2002. 93-108.

Edited Books

  • The International Strindberg/Strindberg Beyond the Borders of Sweden. Evanston, IL. Forthcoming. : Northwestern University Press, 2012.
  • Cavallin, Anna, and Anna W. Stenport. Det gäckande könet: Strindberg och genusteori (The Elusive Gender: Strindberg and Gender Theory). . Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 2006.

Journal Articles

  • "Comparative Scandinavian Modernisms." English Language Notes 49.1 (2011): 161-168.
  • "'’Som potatisar i en säck.’ Den franske bonden hos Strindberg, Zola och Marx." Strindbergiana 26 (2011): 29-40.
  • "Interiority Conceits: Domestic Architecture, Grafophone Recordings, and Colonial Imaginations in August Strindberg’s The Roofing Ceremony (1907).." Modernism/Modernity Forthcoming (2010):
  • "National Betrayal: Language, Location, and Lesbianism in August Strindberg’s Novel A Madman’s Defense.." Comparative Literature Forthcoming (2010):
  • "The Nature of Locked Rooms: Tarjei Vesaas’ novel The Ice Palace and Experimental Crime Fiction.." Studies in the Novel. Forthcoming. (2010):
  • "Original or Copy? Urban Proto-Modernism in August Strindberg’s Novel The Red Room (1879)." Edda 110.4 (2010): 351-367.
  • "Corporations, Crime, and Gender Construction in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Exploring Twenty-first Century Neoliberalism in Swedish Culture. Co-written with Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm." Scandinavian Studies (2009):
  • "Helga Crane’s Copenhagen: Denmark, Colonialism, and Transnational Identities in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Co-written with Arne Lunde. ." Comparative Literature 60.3 (2008): 228-243.
  • "From Arsonists and Bastards to Vampires and Zombies: Urban Spatio-Pathologies in Strindberg’s Chamber Plays.." Studies in the Literary Imagination 40.1 (2007): 35-54.
  • "Bodies Under Assault. Nation and Immigration in Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers. ." Scandinavian Studies 79.1 (2007): 1-24.
  • "Swedish Women’s City Writing and Anna Branting’s Lena: Compexities of Voice, Vision, Divorce, and Desire.." Scandinavica (2007): 7-30.
  • "Estetik, ironi och emotioners fysiologi: Om Göran Tunströms roman Juloratoriet.." voor Skandinavistiek 28.2 (2007): 21-44.
  • "Röda rummet som nationsbygge.." Strindbergiana 19 (2004): 161-169.
  • "Imagining a New Stockholm: Strindberg’s Gamla Stockholm and the Construction of Metropolitan Space.." Scandinavian Studies 74.4 (2002): 483-504.

Courses Taught

  • SCAN/CWL 464; THEA 484. “Ibsen in Translation”
  • SCAN/CWL 463/THEA 483. “Strindberg in Translation”
  • SCAN/CWL/GWS 375: “Scandinavian Sexualities”
  • SCAN 225: “Vikings and Volvos: Scandinavian Culture”
  • SCAN 492: “New Scandinavian Cinema”
  • SCAN 199: “The Geography of Crime: Scandinavian Crime Fiction and Film”