Mikkel Krause Frantzen

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I am Associate Professor in Environmental Aesthetics at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, UCPH, Co-PI on the research project “OIKOS: Care and Crisis in the 21st Century”, literary critic at Politiken, and author of a number of books, most recently Klodens Fald (2021) and Slutspil - Klimasorg, utopisk håb og sommeren 2023 (2024). Later this year (2024), two more books will be published: the anthology Finance Aesthetics - A Critical Glossary (Goldsmiths Press), which I am the co-editor of, and the research monograph The Birth of the Financial Thriller: Making a Killing in the 1970s (Edinburgh UP).

I have translated books by William Burroughs and Judith Butler, and published academic articles in Danish and international journals such as Kritik, Passage, Kvinder, Køn og Forskning, K.&K., Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Studies in American Fiction, Theory, Culture and Society, Third Text and Differences. Last but not least, I have written several essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

My research interests lie in contemporary cultural representations of depression and mental illness; fiction and finance from the 1970s onward; aesthetics and ecology.

I am part of the Green Solutions Centre's Thematic Solution on "Health", and I am currently developing and teaching the course "Environmental Aesthetics" with Dehlia Hannah.

In the Summer of 2023 and the Fall 2024, I am a Humboldt fellow (Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers) at the Humboldt University in Berlin. 

Current research

All my scientific work is fundamentally based on an attempt to understand literature, culture and aesthetics in relation to the contemporary world. It is my strong belief that aesthetic and cultural works, and, by the same token, the study of aesthetics and culture, have an important role to be play in a historical situation defined by multiple crises, global warming, all-encompassing financialization and an explosion in the diagnoses of mental illnesses. More specifically, my research has a twofold focus: On the one hand, I am interested in the relation between mental illness, politics and aesthetic artifacts. In my PhD dissertation I examined depression as a paradigmatic contemporary pathology, both personal and political. Subsequently I worked as a postdoc, funded by The Carlsberg Foundation and as part of the interdisciplinary project “The Culture of Grief” (AAU), on a project on the poetics and politics of grief. On the other hand, for the last couple of years I have studied the relation between finance and fiction within the field of Critical Finance Studies and Economic Humanities, in the collective research project “Finance Fiction” (KU). My individual project is concerned with the genre of the financial thriller in the 1970s, which will result in the monograph The Birth of the Financial Thriller: Making a Killing in the 1970s, to be published by Edinburgh UP in 2024.

During my time as PhD and postdoc, I have thus done substantial work on the mental health crisis and the financial crisis, but lately my focus has been drawn more and more towards the ecological crisis – while insisting that these crises are interconnected and must be analyzed as such. This focus on aesthetics and ecology has, so far, resulted in work on climate grief, cultural representations of oil and plastics, the concept of the hyperabject, and the relation between global warming, utopia and science fiction. At the moment I am, among other things, working on a co-authored articled on Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, and on an English version of my book Klodens Fald.

As of 01.01.2023 I have been co-PI of the collective research project OIKOS – A Cultural Analysis of Care and Crisis in the 21^st Century, funded by the VELUX-foundation (as part of their core-group programme).