I am currently International Research Fellow in a shared position between Lund University (Sweden), University of Stavanger (Norway), and University of Oxford (UK) funded by the Swedish Research Council. At the moment, I am located at the outskirts of Stavanger among beautiful fjords, friendly people, and fascinating seaweed (no irony here, there are so many awesome kinds of seaweed, and I want to get to know them all!)

I have a doctorate in Chinese Literature from Lund University, 2020. In my dissertation, I analyse how contemporary fictional works from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei narrate the complex relationship between body, memory and cityscape. Through a focus on reimagined and metaphorically extended sensory modes that I call literary sensory studies, I engage with themes of scented nostalgia, flavours in fiction, walking as method, literary cartography, the melody of language, gendered cityscapes, metafictional dreams and rhythmic senses of time.

I hold an MA in comparative literature (specialising in Chinese literature) from University of Copenhagen (Denmark), including half a year at Peking University (北大, China).

As a lecturer, I have designed and taught a master’s level course on urban Chinese fiction and taught bachelor’s level courses on modern Chinese history.

I am affiliated with The Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Initiative and the Centre for Gender Studies at University of Stavanger, the The University of Oxford China Centre, and the Centre for Languages and Literature at Lund University.

I am an active member of The Association for Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL), The Asia-Norway Environmental Storytelling Network (ANEST), the Lund University Forum for Comparative Literature as well as the Society of Sinophone Studies.

I have published on a variety of subjects including literary drinking cultures, allegorical cannibalism, Daoist commensality , fictional dictionaries, urban heritage, and digital chronotopes in Chinese and Sinophone fiction (see under the headline “publications” for a full list).

Astrid Møller-Olsen 艾喜

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