Torben Jelsbak

Torben Jelsbak is an associate professor and research director at the Center for Changing Urban and Rural Lives (TRANSITION) at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He specializes in 20th-century Danish and Scandinavian literary and cultural history. His research focuses in particular on the connections between literature and politics, as well as on the role of Danish writers and intellectuals in the face of the rise of fascism in the interwar period and during the German Occupation (1940–1945). 

The project

Title: The Poetics of Resistance: Danish Writers Against Fascism and the Nazi Occupation (1940–1945)

"The project examines Danish literary culture during the German occupation (1940-45) with a special emphasis on exploring the role of literature as an actor of resistance and resilience. Drawing on concepts and theories from the fields of literary sociology and intellectual history, the project aims at developing a new interdisciplinary approach to an important, yet strangely overlooked period in Danish literary history. On this basis, the project addresses important and topical questions concerning the roles of writers and the responsibility of intellectuals in situations of war and occupation. A last but not less essential aim of the project is to unfold the cultural dynamics of the particular situation of Denmark in a international perspective vis-à-vis other occupied countries in Europe using the cases of France and Norway as primary comparative cases."

Hosting institution: Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique (CESSP)

Selective Bibliography

• T. Jelsbak: “The Prophet and the Petroleuse. Georg Brandes and the Making of an Intellectual”, Georg Brandes. Pioneer of Comparative Literature and Global Public Intellectual. Eds. J. Bjerring Hansen, A. Engberg-Pedersen and L. Horne Kjældgaard, Amsterdam/London 2024.
• T. Jelsbak and L.-A. Körber (eds.): New Geographies of Scandinavian Studies: Moving Maps, Reciprocal Images, Emerging Communities, numéro special de  Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia, Poznań 2023.
• L’esthétique de la vulnérabilité. Stratégies narratives et travail de mémoire dans La trilogie de Copenhague de Tove Ditlevsen, Nordiques 42 (2022).
• J. Bjerring-Hansen, T. Jelsbak and A. E. Mrozewicz (red.): Scandinavian Exceptionalisms. Culture, Society, Discourse, Berliner Beiträge zur Skandinavistik 29, Berlin 2021.
• T. Jelsbak and A. Sandberg (eds): Dansk-tyske krige. Kulturliv og kulturkampe. Copenhagen 2020