marianne@u.washington.edu  Dept. of Scandinavian Studies  University of Washington  Box 353420  Seattle, WA 98195-3420

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1990

Marianne Stecher-Hansen’s teaching and scholarship are devoted to Scandinavian literature. Her courses emphasize the study of literary texts in cultural, historical and political contexts and cover a wide selection of Scandinavian literary masterpieces of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries. Her course on World War II and the Nordic region integrates historical scholarship with a study of fiction and literary memoirs. Professor Stecher-Hansen specializes in Danish literature; she supervises the Danish studies program at UW and has edited two volumes of reference works which present Danish writers from the Reformation through the 20th Century. She has also published scholarship on the work of Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Thorkild Hansen.

Lectures & Conference Papers:

“Colonialism and Revisionist Historiography: Thorkild Hansen’s Slave Trilogy,” Denmark and The Black Atlantic, International Conference, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 4 – 6 May 2006.

“Knut Hamsun – Great Voices of Norwegian Literature,” in Norway – a Centennial Celebration, invited public lecture, co-sponsored by Royal Embassy of Norway and the Smithsonian Associates, The Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., 14 November 2005.

“Picturing Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen): European Storyteller in the American Marketplace,” invited plenary lecture, International Conference on Danish Culture, Past and Present: The Last 200 Years, Danish American Heritage Society, Des Moines, Iowa, 14 October 2005.

“From Romantic to Modernist Meta-texts: Commemorating Andersen and the Self-Referential Text,” invited plenary lecture, Fourth International Hans Christian Andersen Conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark, 4 August 2005.

“A Moment in History: Rescue of the Danish Jews, 1943,” invited public lecture for exhibit opening, A Living Wall, co-sponsored by Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center and Northwest Danish Foundation Odegaard Undergraduate Library, University of Washington, 11 January 2004.

Books:

Danish Writers from the Reformation to Decadence, 1550-1900, edited and with an introduction by Stecher-Hansen, volume 300 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, produced by Bruccoli Clark Layman (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2004), 593 pp.

Twentieth-Century Danish Writers, edited and with an introduction by Stecher-Hansen, volume 214 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, produced by Bruccoli Clark Layman (Detroit: Gale Group, 1999), 518 pp.

History Revisited: Fact and Fiction in Thorkild Hansen's Documentary Works, Studies in Scandinavian Literature and Culture (Columbia SC: Camden House, 1997), 164 pp.

Recent and Forthcoming Articles:

“Picturing Karen Blixen—Artist, Charlatan, Heretic, and Iconoclast: European Storyteller in the American Marketplace” in Essays in Danish Culture, Past and Present, Danish American Heritage Society. 2006.

“Romantic and Modern Metatexts: Commemorating Andersen and the Self-Referential Text,” in Hans Christian Andersen between Children’s Literature and Adult Literature, (Odense: University of Southern Denmark Press). 2008.

“H.C. Andersen’s ‘Historien om en Moder’: Allegory and Symbol in the Danish Golden Age” in Hans Christian Andersen: Old Problems and New Readings, edited by Steven P. Sondrup (Odense: Hans Christian Andersen Center/U of Southern Denmark Press and Brigham Young University, 2004), pp. 97-116.

"Both Sacred and Secretly Gay: Isak Dinesen's 'The Blank Page,'" [Reprinted from Pacific Coast Philology, 29:1 (1994): 3-13] in Short Story Criticism: Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers, vol. 75, edited by Joseph Palmisano (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2004), pp. 46-51.

“Whose Hamsun? Author and Artifice: Knut Hamsun, Thorkild Hansen, and Per Olov Enquist,” Edda: Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning 3 (1999): 245-251.

Teaching:

Director and Organizer of the Copenhagen Classroom Summer Program

SCAND 515: Pre-19th Century Scandinavian Literature
SCAN 508: Topics in Scandinavian Prose
SCAN 445/EURO 445: War and Occupation in the Nordic Region
SCAN 462/WO 462: Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen
SCAN 312: Masterpieces in Scandinavian Literature
SCAN 232: Hans Christian Andersen and the Fairy-Tale
DAN 310: The Danish Short Story
DAN 311: Topics in Danish Literature and Culture
DAN 312: The Danish Novel