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  4. Elin Abrahamsson

Elin Abrahamsson

Researcher

Gender and Culture studies unit
Mail
elin.abrahamsson@gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Elin Abrahamsson

I am a researcher and lecturer in Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Gothenburg. I received my PhD in Gender Studies from Stockholm University in 2018 with a dissertation on cultural perceptions of women's reading of popular romance fiction.

My research is situated within the field of feminist cultural studies, with a particular focus on popular culture, traditionally feminized genres and audiences, and readers' engagements with fiction. Drawing on feminist, queer, and cultural theory, I examine how literature, film, television, and other media texts are interpreted, valued, and used, as well as the cultural meanings attached to popular genres and their audiences. 

My doctoral dissertation examined the cultural devaluation of women's reading of romantic fiction through analyses of the books and film-series Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey and their reception in Swedish and international media.

Following my PhD, I completed a three-year international postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). The postdoc was based at the Centre for Uses of Literature at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies at Stockholm University. The project examined Swedish contemporary popular romance fiction and the ways the genre was constructed and promoted in Swedish media and marketing during the 2010s.

In 2026, I began a new three-year research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, entitled Far from Disposable: An Empirical Study of Readers' Attachments to The Legend of the Ice People. As principal investigator, I work together with literary scholar Tuva Haglund (Uppsala University) to investigate readers' attachments to Margit Sandemo's bestselling romance and fantasy series The Legend of the Ice People, which was first published in Swedish between 1982–1989, and which has gained new attention in recent years, not least through a successful audiobook adaptation.