Berit Martha Christel Huntebrinker

Associate Professor Department of Nordic and Media Studies

Email: berit.m.huntebrinker@uia.no
Phone: +47 38 14 21 41
Mobile phone: +47 91 99 08 26
Office: E2 062 (Universitetsveien 25, 4630 Kristiansand, Norway)

Press photo Download business card

Areas of responsibility

I work as an associate professor in didactics at the department for nordic and media studies and teach mostly in the field of teacher education. My background is an M.A. in Comparative Literature, Scandinavian Studies, and Latin American Studies from the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main.

I wrote my doctoral dissertation in literary studies focussing on Norwegian picturebooks and comics from and ecocritical perspective. The dissertation is entitled "Narrating Environmental Citizenship: Norwegian picturebooks and comics in the Anthropocene". The main research questions in my phd project were how multimodal texts for young audiences narrate different concepts of environmental citizenship and how visual and verbal narrative strategies interplay. Employing econarratology, I investigated formal narrative structures that focus on the relationships between humans and the world in which they live.

Research

Academic interests

Ecocriticism / Environmental Humanities

picturebooks and comics

contemporary Nordic literature

borders, thresholds and liminality in literature

Research groups

Huntebrinker, Berit (2026). Å fortelle fra helvete. Etterminne og historieformidling i Marte Mittets Ulvehunger. In Bjorvand, Agnes-Margrethe & Slettan, Svein (Ed.), Nye ungdomsboklesninger. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. ISSN 9788202924652. p. 109–126. doi: 10.23865/cdf.288.ch6. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Stories about the Second World War are prominent in Norway’s collective memory. In recent years, a number of films, novels, comics and nonfiction titles about this time have been published, both for adult and child audiences. In this chapter, I analyse the young adult novel Ulvehunger [Wolf hunger] by Marte Mittet (2021) to investigate how this work presents historical material through an adolescent perspective. The novel is told by 14-year-old Vuk, who is sent to a concentration camp in Northern Norway in 1942. Readers follow Vuk during his journey, which I read as a negative distortion of the Bildungsroman. After introducing the concept of “postmemory” and contextualising the novel’s historical background, my analysis focuses on the role of adolescent perspectives in the novel, and on how intertextuality plays a key role. As a concluding point, I discuss how different narrative strategies interact in the novel’s overall objective to shed light on a lesser known part of Norwegian war history
Føreland, Line Reichelt & Huntebrinker, Berit (2024). Drauger på Sørlandskysten. Om bildeboka Lille-Draugen. In Bjorvand, Agnes-Margrethe; Omland, Siv-Terese & Takle, Cecilie (Ed.), Anne-Cath. Vestly. Nye lesninger av forfatterskapet. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. ISSN 9788202784348. p. 209–223. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Anne-Cath. Vestly var en av våre viktigste og mest toneangivende barnebokforfattere i siste halvdel av 1900-tallet, og for flere generasjoner var hun Norges kanskje høyest elskede radiostemme i programmet Barnetimen for de minste. Gjennom bøker, lydbøker og filmatiseringer kan også dagens lesere bli kjent med Ole Aleksander Filibom-bom-bom, mormor og de åtte ungene, Lillebror og Knerten, Aurora, Guro og alle de andre karakterene Vestly har skapt. Denne boka viser at Anne-Cath. Vestlys verdier og unike forståelse for barns måte å være i verden på fortsatt har mye å lære og fortelle oss. Boka byr på diskusjoner av forfatterskapet opp mot aktuelle temaer i vår tid, som blant annet barnesyn, mangfold, bærekraft, livsmestring og relasjonell etikk. I tillegg får leseren god oversikt og mange dypdykk i Vestlys fortellinger, samt innblikk i hennes arbeidsmetode som forfatter, skuespiller og barnetimevert. Boka er aktuell for alle som er interessert i Anne-Cath. Vestly og i barne- og ungdomslitteratur. Den er særlig relevant for forskere og studenter i barnehagelærer-, grunnskolelærer- og lektorutdanning, bibliotekar- og skolebibliotekarutdanning, og på studier om litteratur, medie- og kommunikasjonsfag, ikke minst studenter som ønsker å skrive en bachelor- eller masteroppgave om Vestlys forfatterskap. Forfatterne er litteraturforskere fra Institutt for nordisk og mediefag og Institutt for pedagogikk ved Universitetet i Agder, og i tillegg bidrar Vestly-biograf Anne Helgesen.
Huntebrinker, Berit (2022). Økoborgerskap i bildebøker. Hvordan vi kan lære om vårt forhold til kloden gjennom verbaltekst og bilder. In Fredwall, Ingeborg Eidsvåg; Moseid, Elin Arnesen & Slettan, Svein (Ed.), Elevene og litteraturen : Estetisk lesing på barnetrinnet. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. ISSN 9788202718848. p. 196–213. Full text in Research Archive

View all works in NVA

Huntebrinker, Berit (2026). There goes Tokyo again. Posthuman entanglements in Shin Godzilla. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Environmental themes are central to kaijū eiga, Japanese monster movies. Godzilla, the first and most famous of these monsters, is a central figure in the genre of ecohorror. Ever since he emerged in Japan in 1954 as a reaction to the atomic bomb, he has been understood as the embodiment of humanity’s hubris and environmental irresponsibility. In my paper, I will discuss the complicated entanglements between Godzilla and the humans, which can be called a precarious coexistence. My focus will lie on the 2016 film Shin Godzilla, a stand-alone production where the monster has been read as a metaphor for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and the tsunami that preceded it. In Shin Godzilla, the monster appears as an evolving force of nature compared to more anthropomorphic depictions of him in earlier instalments. Rather, Godzilla can here more clearly be understood as a representation of nonhuman resistance. I argue that Shin Godzilla depicts the monster as a posthuman figure that scrutinises narratives about human control over the environment, and our role in the Anthropocene. My discussion centres around the ecohorror and how Godzilla installs fear in humans, while also being a result of their doing. Aspects of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality also come into play. Being a result of nuclear waste dumping, Godzilla’s body is deeply entangled with his environment, which humans have impacted heavily. The film’s ending takes this another step further, showing skeletons with both human and monstrous features emerging from Godzilla’s tail. I will also go into the film’s critique of the Japanese government in light of the catastrophe that Godzilla embodies. Godzilla’s entanglements with humans and natural disasters connects discourses of the environmental humanities and popular culture. In this way, mainstream cinema can contribute as a site for environmental discourses.
Nielsen, Maj Schian & Huntebrinker, Berit (2026). Semesterles: Biblioteket som arena for studenters leselyst og kritisk literacy - statusoppdatering. Full text in Research Archive
Nielsen, Maj Schian & Huntebrinker, Berit (2025). Biblioteket som arena for studenters leselyst og kritisk literacy. Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit (2025). Gender Queer: Et blikk på boka som litteratur. Full text in Research Archive
Slotnes, Oda Sagebakken; Vatne, Helle Marie & Huntebrinker, Berit (2025). Litteraturens Mønstre: Vampyren med Berit Huntebrinker. doi: https:/player.captivate.fm/episode/04237f8e-7753-4315-8bda-4a64cb5937f3/. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Episode 13: Hvorfor har vampyren sjarmert lesere i så mange år? Og hvordan har vampyren endret seg siden 1800-tallet? I samtale med Berit Huntebrinker undersøker Oda og Helle denne forførende figurens reise fra det monstrøse til det heltemodige. Vampyrens fortelling sees på gjennom fire sentrale tekster, fra Carmilla (1872) av Sherian le Fanu, Dracula (1897) av Bram Stoker, Interview with the Vampire (1976) av Anne Rice til Twilight (2005) av Stephenie Meyer.
Huntebrinker, Berit (2024). "I am the steward of this sand" - environmental citizenship in Frank Herbert's "Dune". Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit (2024). Marte Mittets "Ulvehunger" som intertekstuell dialog med krig og minne. Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit (2023). Narrating environmental citizenship. Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit (2022). Økoborgerskap i multimodale fortellinger. Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit (2021). Miljøbevisste drauger på Sørlandskysten: Om bildeboka Lille-draugen. Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit (2021). Narrating Environmental Citizenship: an Econarratological Analysis of Human-nature Relationships in Norwegian Picturebooks and Comics. Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit (2020). Narrating environmental citizenship: social responsibility in Lise Myhre's "Nemi". Full text in Research Archive
Huntebrinker, Berit; Hennig, Reinhard & Slettan, Svein (2023). Narrating Environmental Citizenship. Norwegian picturebooks and comics in the Anthropocene. Universitetet i Agder. ISSN 9788284271002. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
In my project, I examine how aspects of “environmental citizenship” are discussed in Norwegian picturebooks and comics. The term “environmental citizenship” encompasses several concepts that originate from political sciences and discuss what it can mean to be a responsible, or “good”, citizen with regard to the environment. The concepts are characterised by various understandings of what citizenship means and which role the environment and its intrinsic value play. Common for the concepts is an argument for the need to change something in our behaviour towards the world we live in. An econarratological perspective: I examine seven multimodal texts in my dissertation, four picturebooks and three comics, published between 1974 and 2019. My theoretical approach is based on econarratology, a direction in literary studies that combines an ecocritical perspective with particular attention to narratological questions, or the texts’ narrative structures. How is the texts’ multimodal “storyworld” presented and which role does the environment play in it? How are aspects of environmental citizenship discussed through verbal text and pictures? And how do the texts address readers to convey perspectives on the environment? These are some of the questions I discuss in the analytical chapters of my dissertation. Main findings: It shows itself that multimodal texts for young readers present various understandings of what it means to be an environmentally aware citizen. The texts foreground different aspects as important when it comes to our relationship with the environment and how we can live more environmentally friendly. The variety in the narratives underlines that a more nuanced examination of picturebooks and comics is both fruitful and necessary in order to take the complexity of children’s literature seriously when it comes to environmental questions.

View all works in NVA

Published Apr. 16, 2024 11:31 AM