Teaching Experience

I love helping students discover the richness of the literary world that surrounds them and the relevance of those texts to the world they inhabit. I try to help my students engage with the texts we read, to form their own informed opinions, and understand how they arrived at them. I love teaching at BYU because of the freedom to be open about the spiritual dimensions of knowledge and action.

Research

I work primarily on questions of cultural identity and how they are constructed and disseminated through mass media, particularly newspapers and silent film. I work in three main fields: Scandinavian Studies (which includes work on Søren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen, Asta Nielsen, Danish film, and Danish immigrant communities in the US and Australasia); Global Mormon Studies (primarily with regard to the Church in Scandinavia and among Scandinavian immigrants); and Cinema Studies, in particular the circulation of European silent films.

Selected Publications

• 2017 Danish but Not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850-1920. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Finalist for the 2016 Juanita Brooks Prize in Mormon Studies. Honorable mention award for Mormon History Association Best Book on International Mormon History 2019.
• 2012 Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• 2019 “Mapping Cinema Ghosts: Reconstructing the Circulation of Nordic Silent Film in Australia.” Nordic Film Cultures: A Globalized History of Cinematic Elsewheres, edited by Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Arne Lunde. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 25-41.
• 2019 “German by Birth, Danish by Choice: The Fluidity of Cultural Identity in Schleswig-Holstein/Sønderjylland.” Cosmopolitan Imaginings / Kosmopolitische Gedankenwelten, edited by Alison Lewis, Christiane Weller, and Katie Sutton. Königshausen und Neumann. 167-178.
• 2019 “He’s been Working on the Railroad: A Case Study of Danish Convert-Immigrant Economies in the Utah Territory.” Business and Religion: The Intersection of Faith and Finance, edited by Matthew Godfrey. Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center Press. 229-252.
• 2019 “De-constructing Community in Twenty-First Literary Transformations of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘The Snow Queen.’” Hans Christian Andersen and Community, edited by Anne Klara Bom. Odense: University of Southern Denmark Press. 279-300.
• 2017 “Divas down under: the circulation of Asta Nielsen’s and Francesca Bertini’s films in Australian cinemas in the 1910s.” Studies in Australasian Cinema 11:2, 59-76.
• 2017 “Double Jeopardy in Pleasant Grove: The Gendered and Cultural Challenges of Being a Danish Mormon Missionary Grass Widow in Territorial Utah.” Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography, edited by Rachel Cope, Amy Easton-Flake, Lisa Olsen Tate, and Keith Erekson. Farleigh Dickinson University Press. 185-208.

Service

Mentoring students and junior faculty is one of the most important aspects of my academic service, since members of those groups are just getting started on their professional paths and will benefit most from intensive support. The university and larger academic community can only function if all of its members contribute, so I am happy to be part of decision-making processes, perform assessment tasks, and write letters of recommendation, among other things.

Citizenship assignments

• Graduate coordinator, Comparative Arts and Letters, 2020-present
• College of Humanities representative on the Faculty Advisory Committee; co-chair of the Compensation and Benefits Committee, 2020-present
• Executive Board member, Mormon History Association, 2020-present
• President of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, 2019-2021
• Vice-President of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, 2017-2019
• Editor of The Bridge. Journal of the Danish American Heritage Society, 2014-present
• Section Head, Comparative Literature, Fall 2017, 2018-2019