Johan Höglund

Dr Johan Höglund is Professor of English at the Department of Languages and a member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He holds degrees from Brown University and Uppsala University. His research focuses the relationship between popular culture and Empire as it manifests during different eras and in different media, and on how fiction narrates the ongoing planetary emergency. He is currently concluding the project Militarizing the Anthropocene: Security, Militant Futures and American Climate Fiction funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. He is also the PI of the project Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction. This project is funded by FORMAS, a Swedish research council for sustainability and studies how genre fiction set in climate-transformed futures imagines that human society will respond and adapt to the profound and imminent transformation of current food systems.

Teaching

Johan teaches English Literature, American Literature, Literary Theory, Postcolonial Literature and the Anthropocene narrative on graduate and postgraduate courses. He also supervises and examines doctoral dissertations at Linnaeus University and other institutions.

Research

Johan Höglund has published extensively on the relationship between imperialism and popular culture in a number of different contexts, including the late-Victorian era, the long history of US global expansion and decline, and the often unrecognized era of Nordic colonialism. He has also done work on fiction that speculate on how the planet and people will transform due to the climate emergency. He is the author of the monograph The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Ashgate, 2014), and editor and co-author of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (with Justin Edwards och Rune Graulund, Minnesota University Press, 2021), Nordic Gothic (with Maria Holmgren Troy, Yvonne Leffler och Sofia Wijkmark, Manchester UP, 2020), B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (with Justin D Edwards, Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (with Katarina Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (with Tabish Khair, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He has published extensively in journals such as Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Game Studies, English Literature in Transition, Continuum, and The European Journal of American Studies. 

Commissions

Johan Höglund is a part of the editorial board of Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies. He has edited several academic collections, and also served as guest editor for special issues on Nordic Colonialism for Scandinavian Studies (with Linda Andersson Burnett) and on the Contemporary Adventure Narrative for The Journal of Popular Culture (with Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet). He directs the LNU working group for innovation that is part of SIREUS, a project initiated by the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerse and aiming to increase collaboration between Sweden and the US.