Maria Damkjær

Maria Damkjær, Associate Professor (temporary)
Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen

I received my PhD from King's College London in 2013, and that project resulted in a book, Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). In this project, I worked with serials of novels and cookbooks, and with periodical writing, and I never looked back. I have since published on comic umbrellas in print culture (VPR, 2017), and I have a forthcoming book chapter about the beach trope in popular periodicals and the circulation of cliché. My current book project is about genre hybridity in mid-century popular periodicals: the acts of page filling, advertising and general service that narrative fiction was made to do in the pages of the weekly magazine. The project addresses what I call a 'print imaginary' -- a fictional realm where the magazine itself, or its production, is made symbolically meaningful, either by imagining ideal readers, or by dramatising the magazine and its print culture heroics.

Since I started coming to RSVP conferences in 2014 (Wilmington), they have been the conferences that have consistently given me most food for thought and most help for my work. I wish to serve on the board to give back to an association that has provided me with so much community over the years. I have experience managing research series, I have served on the board of my choir, and I am a strong believer in the power of associations and co-operatives. My particular passion is the wellbeing of PhD students and early career researchers.