Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies with special reference to Gender and Culture at the Unit of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden.

CURRENT ACTIVITIES

Nina Lykke is co-founder of the International Network for Queer Death Studies, and the International Network for ECOcritical and DECOlonial Research.

Her current research focuses on cancer cultures, critical patienthood studies, geopolitics of cancer, queer widowhood, death, dying, mourning and spirituality in queerfeminist materialist and decolonial perspectives. She is also doing research on autophenomenographic writing, and experimenting with ways to combine poetic and narrative writing with critical-affirmative philosophical and cultural theoretical inquiries.

Other current research interests are: postsocialist imaginaries of protest in feminisms, the whiteness of Marxism, intersectionality as theory and practice, and feminist studies as postdisciplinary practice between cruel optimism and everyday utopias.

She is managing co-editor (together with Jeff Hearn) of the book series Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality.

From Sept 2018, she is member of the international advisory board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

She is also  Director of Stint International Research Training Network: New Tools for Transnational Analysis in Postgraduate Intersectional Gender Research – a collaboration between Gender Studies units at the University of Western Cape, South Africa; Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, Bergen University, Norway; and Linköping University, Sweden.

PREVIOUS ACTIVITIES

Before taking up a professorship in Gender and Culture in Sweden, Nina Lykke , for 15 year, led a Women’s and Gender Studies Center at the University of Southern Denmark; the center was the first WS center in Denmark.

Since its inception in 1999, she headed the PhD program in interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Linköping University (the first PhD program of this kind in Sweden). From 2004-2013, she was also the head of the Gender Studies Unit at Linköping University.

She was founding director and later co-director of an international centre of gender excellence, GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (2007-2017) as well as scientific leader of a Nordic and a Swedish-International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (2003-2017).

She has extensive international experience from numerous cross-national projects and networks in gender research and education in Gender Studies. From 2001-2005, she was managing director of AOIFE (Association of Institutions of Feminist Education and Research in Europe), and she was also a longstanding member of the lead-team of the European thematic network in Womens Studies, Athena.

She was for many years associate editor of the European Journal of Womens Studies , and she has been advisor for several other scholarly feminist journals, among others Feminist Theory; NORA; Gender, Technology and Development; and Women, Gender, Research.

In 2008, she was awarded one of the Linköping University’s distinguished professorships due to her merits in research, education and management.

In 2016, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Karlstad University, Sweden.