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Jenny Bergenmar

Director of Studies

Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion
Telephone
+46 31-786 43 30
Mail
jenny.bergenmar@lir.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

Professor

Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion
Telephone
+46 31-786 43 30
Mail
jenny.bergenmar@lir.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Jenny Bergenmar

Professor, Comparative Literature

Orchid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6761-3544

Research Interests

  • Digital humanities (diversity in infrastructures, information history, and metadata practices)

  • Literature, disability, and neurodiversity

  • Medical humanities

  • Queer literature and theory

  • History of reading

  • Reception history

Ongoing Research

I am currently working on a Destination Horizon project on the translation across of queer metadata languages and contexts and preparing for the project Reading beyond the Norm: Neurodiversity, Fiction, and Reading Practices. I am also participating in the research network connected to DIDOC, the Dawit Isaak Database of Censorship, and am a member of the Ecologies of Neurodiversity research network at the University of Oslo.

2019–2024. QUEERLIT: Metadata Development and Searchability for LGBTQI Literature. The purpose of the project was to create a database of Swedish LGBTQI literature and to develop methods for indexing LGBTQI literature, thereby facilitating further research in the field. The project was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2021–2024:


QUEERLIT database

2023–2024. Co-edited Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2025) with Louise Creechan (Durham University) and Anna Stenning (University of Southampton). The volume was published in the series Critical Interventions in Medical and Health Humanities.

2018. Remembering Selma Lagerlöf, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Principal Investigator). This citizen humanities project collected letters written by Selma Lagerlöf as a continuation of the project The Public’s Letters to Selma Lagerlöf 1890–1940.

2014–2016. Swedish Women’s Writing on Export in the 19th Century, funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project sought to re-evaluate historical material related to selected authorships and texts without restricting them to national histories or literary canons, in order to shed light on women’s importance as cultural mediators across borders. The results were published in the volume Swedish Women’s Writing on Export: Tracing Transnational Reception in the Nineteenth Century.

2008–2013. The Public’s Letters to Selma Lagerlöf 1890–1940, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. This reading-history project explored the thousands of letters from the public sent to Selma Lagerlöf during her literary career.

2010–2013. Member of the Management Committee of COST Action IS0901, Women Writers in History: Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture.

2008–2012. The Selma Lagerlöf Archive, a digital critical edition and digitisation project, now available through the Swedish Literature Bank.

2012. Narrating Autism, funded by the Anna Ahrenberg Fund. This project explored texts about and by autistic people within a Critical Disability Studies framework.

Other Academic Roles and Appointments

2026– Editor, K&K: Kultur og klasse

2026. Member of the Programme Committee, DARIAH Annual Event 2026, Rome

2023–2025. Member of Review Panel HS-A: Aesthetic Disciplines, Swedish Research Council

2023–2026. Director of Studies in Comparative Literature, Theatre Studies, and Digital Humanities

2021–2023. Subject Chair for Comparative Literature, Theatre Studies, and Digital Humanities

2019–2022. External Member of the Faculty Board for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Karlstad University

2015–2017. Programme Coordinator for the Master’s Programme in Digital Humanities

2013–2014. Head of Teacher Education at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion