In my research, I specialise in Viking-Age ritual, religion, culture and society and Old Norse poetry and language. At the same time, I value a theoretically and empirically comparative perspective.
I work with oral poetry and ritual performance in the Old Norse world; Nordic mythology; runic inscriptions and runic poetry; cultural memory studies; and the application of bio-cultural evolutionary theories in the history of religion. I am especially interested in how rituals might have been practiced and how they affected the practitioners.
I teach courses on and in the history of religion with a focus on archaic (historical) religions, primarily pre-Christian Nordic religion and mythology, but also other historical religions such as West African Yoruba religion and Hawaiian religion. I also teach the course primary language paper in Old Norse language, where the students are trained in analysis of their own translations of Old Norse source texts. In addition, I have, among other things, taught courses dealing with gender and femininity in the pre-Christian Nordic region, the study of rituals in the past and present, as well as orality and oral tradition and religions.
