Harstad Memorial Lecture

Dr. Rikke Platz Cortsen will provide an overview of the trends in contemporary Nordic comics and harkens back throughout the history of the medium in this part of the world looking at the aesthetic qualities and social themes currently shaping the field of Nordic comics.

Dr. Rikke Platz Cortsen is Danish lecturer at University of Texas, Austin where she teaches Danish language and culture including courses on Hans Christian Andersen, Northern European Comics, Contemporary Scandinavian Stories and Copenhagen as a City of Culture. She got her PhD from the University of Copenhagen with a thesis on time and space in comics. She researches space and place in comics in the Nordic countries and her latest peer reviewed publication is “Kverneland and Fiske in the Footsteps of Great Artists:  Re-tracing as a Tool for Artist Biographies in comics form” in ImageText Volume 10, Issue 3 about the ways in which these two Norwegian comics creators tell the biographies of well-known artists.

Endowed by the generosity of the descendants of Bjug Harstad och others, the Bjug Harstad Endowed Lecture was established to carry out Harstad’s heartfelt plea to maintain ties with Scandinavian culture and traditions.