Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of English, Aarhus University. His research examines the villains of American popular media from a moral psychological perspective. Jens is also interested in the rhetoric and cultural manifestations of political polarization in the United States.

Many of Jens's recent publications focus on voices. These include a study of the accents of heroes and villains in Disney animation, an analysis of Donald Trump's distinctive use of voice, and a historical examination of American professional wrestlers' stereotyping uses of voice.

Mathias Clasen is an associate professor in the Department of English, Aarhus University. His research is primarily concerned with horror media—focusing on American horror—and other aspects of “recreational fear.” He is Director of the Recreational Fear Lab.

Mathias has published numerous academic articles and several books on horror. His most recent book, A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies (OUP, 2021), shows that horror offers many pleasures and benefits that its critics are apt to overlook. He is currently working on a forthcoming book on America's Master of Horror, Stephen King.

Inger H. Dalsgaard is an associate professor in American studies at Aarhus University. Her research in the field of US cultural expression comprises digital narration, science and technology in literature, conspiracy culture, popular culture, gender and romance genre fiction, and the historical roles of American First Ladies.

Inger has published extensively on the author Thomas Pynchon over the years, but recent publications reflect her growing interest in American celebrity, fandom, and conspiracy cultures as well as in paranoid and political styles of communication, including a focus on gendered uses of soft power, in the Trump era.

Mark Eaton is an associate professor in the Department of English, Aarhus University. His primary research areas include the study of “political voices” in crisis contexts, as well as the role of metaphor, history, literary quotation, and other features of language in political communication. He is Director of the Canadian Studies Centre.

Mark has published numerous articles and chapters on political communication. Reflecting his active involvement in the Center of Voice Studies, Mark has also published on voices in American popular culture, including a recent study on female voices in twentieth and twenty-first century American cinema.

Jody Pennington is an associate professor in the Department of English, Aarhus University. His research interests include American history, media, and music. In recent years, he has been engaged in many administrative activities in the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, as Deputy Head of School.

Jody is the author of The History of Sex in American Film (Praeger, 2007) and co-editor of A History of Evil in Popular Culture: What Hannibal Lecter, Stephen King, and Vampires Reveal about America (Bloomsbury, 2014). He has published numerous article and chapters on American culture and history.

Helle Strandgaard Jensen is an associate professor of contemporary cultural history at the Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark and holds a joint-directorship at Center for Digital History Aarhus (CEDHAR). Her research interests include the history of media and childhood history in the United States during the latter part of the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

Jensen is the PI of the ERC Consolidator project WEB CHILD 'Changing Childhoods in the Early Era of the WWW' which investigates early internet cultures across the United States, Denmark and South Korea between 1995 and 2005. Her latest book is Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Matthias Stephan is Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies and Literature at the Department of English, Aarhus University. He researches postmodernism, its implications in Gothic, sci-fi, and crime fiction, and their intersections in considering global climate change.

His most current research (Bloomsbury 2026) focuses on literary narratives in climate change fiction and its impact on our motivation to act to mitigate the crisis. While his work spans national lines, he has written about American authors including Harper Lee, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Edan Lepucki and Alexandra Kleeman as well as film (The Day After Tomorrow) and television (Battlestar Galactica; Stranger Things; GLOW; Riverdale; The Americans).

Tore Rye Andersen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Deputy Head of the School of Communication and Culture. His research is mainly focused on Post45 American fiction and addresses topics such as the materiality and mediality of literature, and the Anthropocene.

Tore has published extensively on authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and William Gibson. His book Den nye amerikanske roman was published in 2011, and his most recent monograph is Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene (CUP, 2023).

Elisabetta Ferrari is an AIAS-AUFF fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarhus University. Her research addresses the social and political implications of digital technologies, with a focus on social justice and activism.

Ferrari’s work approaches the United States in comparative perspective. She is the author of Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies (University of California Press, 2024), which examines how activists in Hungary, Italy and the United States envision the role of Silicon Valley’s digital technologies in their struggles for social justice. She is currently writing a second book, which focuses on mutual aid activism during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom.  

Peter Mortensen is Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of English, Aarhus University. He researches modern literature and culture with a special emphasis on ecocriticism and the environmental humanities.

Mortensen is the author of a forthcoming monograph on Isak Dinesen, and his publications also include essays on American writers including Jack London and H. P. Lovecraft.

Stephen Joyce is an associate professor in the Department of English at Aarhus University. His research interests include media franchises and industries, worldbuilding aesthetics and practices, Asian American literature, conspiracy theories, and fan cultures.

He is the author of A River of Han: Eastern Tragedy in a Western Land (Winter Verlag, 2015) on Korean American literature and Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which examines the post-apocalyptic genre across American media. He is one of the editors of Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media and a co-director of the Centre for Irish Studies at Aarhus University (CISA).

Christian Olaf Christiansen is Professor in Intellectual History at Aarhus University. He has previously published Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society (Oxford University Pres, 2015) and co-edited Amerikanske tænkere: 14 intellektuelle der ændrede USA [American Thinkers: 14 Intellectuals Who Changed the USA] (Informations Forlag, 2016). His research brings historical perspective to urgent issues like the role of business in American society, human rights, and poverty reduction at the United Nations.

New publications include In Defense of Economic and Social Human Rights: An Intellectual History, 1940s to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and Designing Global Economic Equality: The Making and Unmaking of Global Egalitarian Politics at the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2026). While in recent years Christian has shifted focus from a Western viewpoint to a more global history of ideas, he retains an interest in American history.