Susan Brantly

Susan Brantly received a B.A. from Harvard (1980), an M.A. from the University of Minnesota (1983), and her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1987. Her book, The Life and Writings of Laura Marholm (1991) is the standard work on Marholm, who was a cultural mediator between Scandinavia and Germany in the late 1800s. That book was published in German translation in 2004. Understanding Isak Dinesen (2002) provides close readings of that author’s complex works. Her other books include an anthology of Scandinavian nineteenth-century short prose in translation, Sex and the Modern Breakthrough (2004), and a co-edited volume, The Nordic Storyteller: Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen (2009). Contemporary Swedish historical fiction remains a central research interest, and she has published articles on writers such as P.C. Jersild, Sven Delblanc, Sara Lidman, Per Anders Fogelström, P.O. Enquist and others in journals such as, Clio, Comparative Literature, Scandinavian Studies, Horizont. She has also published on August Strindberg and other nineteenth-century Nordic writers, and contributed the chapter on the rise of modernism (1890-1950) in The History of Swedish Literature (1996). She served as president of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study from 2007 to 2009. She is currently the chief editor of the Scandinavian Literature and Film series, published by the Welsh Academic Press and is a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she has held a position since 1987 (See profile).