Background and experience
Research Profile
I teach and conduct research in literature, aesthetics, and literary theory. My research moves between literary studies, the history of aesthetic ideas, media aesthetics, and interdisciplinary artistic and curatorial practice, with a particular interest in the relations between aesthetic form, materiality, nature, and modes of knowledge.
In 2019, I completed my PhD with a dissertation on the Norwegian writer Tor Ulven, examining the archaeological imagination in Gravgaver, Det tålmodige, and Stein og speil. Combining close reading with aesthetic theory, archaeology, and media history, the dissertation investigated how literary form engages with deep time, materiality, memory, and historical experience. This archaeological perspective continues to inform my research into the histories and transformations of aesthetic concepts and forms.
A second strand of my research concerns poetics and the material and infrastructural conditions of literature. Here I am interested not only in literary form in a narrow sense, but in how writing is produced, circulated, and encountered through changing media, technologies, formats, and institutions. My current work explores these questions through what I describe as an infrastructural poetics, connecting close attention to poetic form with the material systems through which literature becomes possible and perceptible.
My research also extends into artistic and curatorial practice. Together with artist Jan Freuchen, I developed Game of Life (2012–2020), a series of exhibitions and publications at Kristiansand Kunsthall and Lord Jim Publishing investigating how artistic practices can model, discuss, and simulate complex systems and forms of life. I have subsequently participated in interdisciplinary artistic research and curatorial projects connecting literature, aesthetics, art, material processes, and conceptions of nature.
I lead the interdisciplinary research group SENSUS COMMUNIS – Literature, Aesthetics, Nature at the University of Agder, in collaboration with Camilla Flodin (Philosophy) and Charles I. Armstrong (English Literature). The group brings together researchers across the humanities working on literature, art, aesthetics, and environmental thought. A central concern is how aesthetic forms and experiences contribute to changing conceptions of nature and to the environmental humanities more broadly.
Across these different areas, my research asks how aesthetic concepts and forms emerge historically, how they are conditioned by material and medial infrastructures, and how literature and art produce distinctive forms of experience and knowledge.
Areas of responsibility
Research Interests
Aesthetics and the history of aesthetic ideas – including aesthetic experience, natural aesthetics, materiality, and the historical transformation of aesthetic concepts.
Poetics and literary form – with particular emphasis on modern and contemporary poetry and prose, and on the relations between form, perception, and knowledge.
Media aesthetics and infrastructural poetics – investigating how writing, publishing, media technologies, material formats, and infrastructures shape literary production, circulation, and reading.
Literature, nature, and environmental humanities – including changing literary and aesthetic conceptions of nature, forms of life, ecology, and biological diversity.
Archaeology, memory, and deep time – examining how literature and art engage with material traces, historical layers, memory, and temporalities extending beyond individual experience.
Artistic and curatorial research – particularly interdisciplinary practices connecting literature, aesthetic theory, contemporary art, exhibition-making, and material processes.
Literary criticism and publishing – as aesthetic and cultural practices and as institutions mediating between literature, art, and public discourse.
Research
Selected publications
Tenningen, Sigurd. 2027 (forthcoming). “Towards an Infrastructural Poetics: The Material Conditions of Literary Form.” In Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Nordic Poetry, edited by Harri Veivo and Emmanuel Reymond. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
Tenningen, Sigurd. 2025. Glipene / Georges Perec. Essay. H//O//F.
Tenningen, Sigurd. 2024. “Mellom Naturphilosophie og symbolisme. Naturen som subjekt i Emil Boysons lyrikk.” Norsk litteraturvitenskapelig tidsskrift 27 (1): 3–18.
Tenningen, Sigurd, and Jan Freuchen. 2020. Game of Life: Feltkommentar. Kristiansand: Lord Jim Publishing.
Tenningen, Sigurd. 2019. Jordens ubevisste hukommelse. Tor Ulven som arkeolog. PhD dissertation, University of Agder.
Tenningen, Sigurd, and Jan Freuchen. 2017. Appelsiniakomplekset. H//O//F.
Tenningen, Sigurd. 2015. Vegetasjonens triumf er total. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag.