Bent
Sørensen has a Ph.D.
in American
Literature and Culture from Aalborg University, where he is Associate
Professor of English. He teaches 20th and 21st
century
American literature, cultural studies and theory, and various writing
classes, including Creative Writing, in the
interdisciplinary
Department of Culture and Global Studies. He is a member of the
Interdisciplinary Research Group in Culture (IRGiC).
- J.D. Salinger/John
Updike/Douglas
Coupland
- The Cultural Semiotics of the “X”
- Generationality and Generational Novels
- Images of Europe in Literature
- Elvis
Presley and Jane Fonda as American Icons
- Van Morrison’s Lyrics as Narratives of Exile and Longing
- Adaptation in the Film Adaptation
- The Prose Poems of Margaret Atwood and Nin
Andrews
- Alan
Lightman and Andrew Crumey as Physicists and Novelists
- The Short Fiction of
Alasdair Gray
- Iconicity in Mark
Z. Danielewski
- The Poetics of A. R.
Ammons and Jack Kerouac
- Tourette Syndrome as a Post-modern Trope in Fiction
- Beat
Generation Dream Writing
- Beat Writers as Cultural Others in Exile Poets’ Memoirs
- Portraits of Black Subjects in Danish Modernist Painting
- Countercultural Icon-work: The Case of Uncle Sam
- Representations of Big Sur in
American 1950s
and '60s Writing
- The Ambiguous Valorization of Madness in Beat Literature
- The Lyrics of Neil Young, Leonard
Cohen and Joni
Mitchell as
Canadian Cultural Critiques
- Poetry as Reverse Ekphrasis in Popular Films
- Meena Alexander and ‘The CulturalKernel’
- Cadillacs as Cultural Texts
- Patty Hearst and Charles
Manson as Icons of Transgression
- Post- 9/11 Novels: Jonathan
Safran
Foer, Ken Kalfus, Don DeLillo, a.o.
- Robert Gibbons and The Evergreen Review
- Neal Cassady and On The Road
- The Tragic Logic of Passing
- Yuppies and
Psychopaths in Blank Generation Literature
- The Lyrics
of Nick Drake as Expressions of Existential Anxiety
- Christy Moore’s album Listen as a Glocal Text
- Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road” Remediated
- The Film In Bruges and Pinter's The Dumb Waiter
- Bob Dylan and the Apocalypse
- Bret Easton Ellis and the West
- Non-Places in Douglas Coupland’s Novels
- Paul Auster as a Popular Postmodern Writer
- Beat Biographies and the Carr/Kammerer Episode
- Nomadic Translation and Lucian Blaga
- Amiri Baraka as a Dissident Dissident
- Allen Ginsberg's “Wichita Vortex Sutra” as the Last War Poem
- Representations of Black Subjects in Leo Estvad’s Fiction
Articles
have appeared in The
Explicator, Philament,
OASIS, Orbis Litterarum, The Nordic Journal of
English
Studies, Literary
Research, Caiet de Semiotica, PsyArt Journal, Imaginaires, Recherches
Anglaises et Nord-Americaines, Academic
Quarter and Comparative
Critical Studies - as well as in numerous conference proceedings volumes
and themed monographs (3 new book chapters came out in 2013 and more are forthcoming in 2014).
Book reviews
have appeared in Cercles and Studio
Journal. A piece from The
Explicator was reprinted in 2007 in Harold Bloom’s
highly selective reader on T.S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land.
* * *
His current book projects consist of collecting monographs on Cultural Text Studies approaches to Song Lyrics, and Beat Generation Essays.
He is one of four editors of PsyArt Journal
- the online journal of The Foundation for the Psychological Study of
the Arts, which he has been President of since 2011. Since 2010 he has
served on the editorial board of Academic Quarter, the AAU academic
journal for research from the humanities. A 2014 issue of AQ on Icons will be co-edited by him, with Helle Thorsøe Nielsen and Ella Chmielewska.
He has also previously edited 5
Faces of Derrida, a
short
collection commemorating Jacques Derrida with 4 readings of aspects of
Derrida’s work and a round-table discussion of
the recent film Derrida
(Department of Languages,
Culture and Aesthetics, Working Papers
35, January, 2005). Part of
this work
was presented at the Following
Derrida conference in Winnipeg, October 2006 by his colleagues
Søren Balle and Gray Kochhar-Lindgren. The IRGiC volume
on intermedial and interarts connections
which he co-edited has appeared from Aalborg University Press, under
the Danish title Interaktioner -
Kunstarternes produktive Mellemværender, and in 2014 he will co-edit a new IRGiC volume on Non-Places.
Two
of his translation projects have appeared in book form from Eyecorner Press:
1. Årstider
i Skeptikerens Himmel - Aforismer af Valeriu Butulescu (63 pp. - selected, translated
into Danish and ed. w/ Camelia Elias), 2008
2. Jagged
Timeline - Selected Poems by Robert Gibbons (180 pp. - selected,
translated into Danish and ed., w. a scholarly intro.), March 2010
His translation into English of Gorm Henrik Rasmussen’s book on Nick Drake was published in January 2012: Pink Moon: A Story about Nick Drake (176 pp) Rocket 88, ISBN 978-1906615291
* * *
In 2003-4 he set a
personal record by
appearing at 15 international conferences in one academic
year,
giving 12 different
papers at these events. This feat he will never attempt to duplicate.
The 2004-5 academic year
featured (only) 6
conferences, including ESSE-7
in
Zaragoza, where he was both a seminar
convener (Disorders
of the Mind in Literature and Film) and a participant in a workshop on “The Gothic”. The
year continued with
conferences
in
Alcalá, Reims and Krakow, NAAS
2005 in Växjö and ICLP 22 in Cordoba.
2005-6
featured a total of 11 conferences, starting with appearances in Canterbury
and Athens
in October '05 and Louisville, Kentucky in February '06, Reims
in March, Copenhagen and Helsinki (Maple Leaf & Eagle 11) in
May, and Karlstad in June, ICLP
23 in Helsinki and
“Poetry
and Politics” in Stirling, both in July '06. In
April at
the EAAS-2006 in Nicosia
he convened a workshop on the
poetics of nonconformity with Nephie Christodoulides,
and at ESSE-8 in
London in August 2006 he
was co-convener of Anthony Johnson’s seminar on “The
New Imagology”.
The fall of '06 was conference free, but the rest of the 2006-7 season
featured BAAS-2007 in
Leicester, NAAS-2007 in Tampere,
and culminated with ICLP 24 in
Belgrade.
The 2007-8 academic year was
more prolific,
having
commenced
with two events in France: Strasbourg in November '07, and Reims in
March 2008, followed by two Nordic events in May: Renvall’s Maple Leaf &
Eagle 12 and EAAS-2008
in Oslo. After ICLP 25 in Lisbon in July,
August of ’08
featured 2 more talks at ISSEI-11 in
Hesinki, and at ESSE-9 in
Aarhus.
The 2008-9 academic year
opened with Dick Ellis’ delightful Kerouac
conference in Birmingham in December. Spring 2009 only featured
two events,
both recurrent favourites: NAAS, this
time held in Copenhagen, and ICLP 26, which was held in Viterbo, Italy.
On the home front, the first ever IRGiC seminar was held at AAU, on the theme of Interactions.
The 2009-10 academic year held
8 events, including the
big European conferences: EAAS-2010
in Dublin, where he convened a workshop
on Remediating the Beats;
ESSE-10
in Turin in August; as well as recurrent events such as Renvall’s Maple
Leaf and Eagle 13 and the NAES, also held in Finland (Oulu) this
year. The summer of 2010 of
course featured the annual PsyArt event, ICLP 27 - this year held in
Hungary.
There were three more conference appearances: An invited lecture at the
Syndrome Syndrome symposium at Keele in the UK, the Style In Theory
event on Malta, and the Louisville Conference on
Literature and Culture after 1900 (this time with an association
workshop for Psy-Art’ers where he was an invited panelist). IRGiC held its second annual seminar at AAU, on Cultural Traffic.
The 2010-11 academic year featured a first ever Irish Studies
event, namely the NISN 7 in Tromsø in December; the NAAS 2011 in Oslo in
May - and of course the Roskilde ICLP 28 in
June 2011 which he organized w. Camelia Elias. IRGiC held its third annual seminar at AAU, on Spectrality.
2011-12 started with another
Irish Studies do in Dalarna, Sweden in November, the 4th IRGiC seminar (on The End) in April, a return to the Maple Leaf and Eagle conference in
Helsinki (5th consecutive appearance) in May - and continued with ICPA 29 (formerly ICLP) in
Ghent, Belgium (8th consecutive year), as well as the inaugural
European Beat Studies Network gathering in Middelburg, Holland in
September. Furthermore, he was in absentia co-convener of the seminar on “Literature and Buddhism in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts” at ESSE -11 in Istanbul.
2012-13 was to have seen a return to
Dalarna for the NISN conference in December, but illness prevented his
participation. 2013 proper started with “Bestsellers and Blockbusters” at AAU in March, NAAS-2013 in Karlstad in May, and regular IRGiC (Places and Non-Places) and PSY-ART activities (ICPA 30 in Porto). The academic year culminated with hosting the EBSN 2 in Aalborg in August.
2013-14 commenced with an
invited presentation at Tarotcon
UK in Keswick in September and continued with an appearance at Poetry Lab in
Brussels in November. 2014 brings the local AAU conference “Dissent!” in January, EAAS-2014 in Den Haag in April, Maple Leaf and Eagle 15 in Helsinki - and will also involve the hosting of the
9th NISN conference in
Aalborg in May. In addition there will be the
annual IRGiC research seminar (on Value & Quality), and of course, ICPA 31 in Madrid in June.
* * *
He
has completed research and exchange visits to University of British
Columbia,
Vancouver (1996); Columbia University, New York (2001); University of
Lisbon (2003); Brenau
University,
Georgia, USA (2003 & 2004). A visit to University of Helsinki
(Renvall Institute) and
Oulu
University, Finland took place in late
April 2005. A third visit to Brenau to celebrate
the launch of the collaborative CTS
2 volume, Transatlantic,
and an invited lecture at IPSA in Gainesville,
Florida, both took place in
February 2006. A re-visit to Oulu took
place in April 2007. In December 2007 he was invited to visit and
lecture at
Babes-Bolyai
University, Cluj,
Romania. February 2010 featured
a presentation of Transatlantic scholarship at Georgia Gwinnett
College, Lawrenceville, GA, and Spring 2012 included an ERASMUS exchange to Åbo Akademi, Turku, Finland.
See
also:
List of
works
Selected papers
page
Videnbase
Nordjylland
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