Leni Terese Hansen (she/her) works as a research and teaching assistant (vit. ass) at the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU. She holds a master’s degree in English Literature and Culture and has completed the post graduate teacher training program at the Department of Teacher Education at NTNU, and is a qualified English teacher. In addition, she has finished courses in Film studies and Religious studies.
At NTNU, Leni has worked as a student course assistant in the PhD course EH8000 – Topics in Environmental Humanities (Environmental storytelling and narrative) and as a seminar lecturer in the interdisciplinary course HFO1004 The Human Era? at the Department of Art and Media Studies (2021/2022). Furthermore, she has worked as a research assistant in the research project TransLit: Sustainable Ethics, Affects, and Pedagogies, for three consecutive years, and helped contribute to the Canada chapter for The Year’s Work in English Studies (Oxford UP).
Leni has strong ties to Trondheim’s film environment. She is a board member of Trondheim Film Society (Trondheim Filmklubb) and previously worked at Cinemateket Trondheim. As such, she has experience in booking, screening, and introducing film, and she uses her position to passionately provide Trondheim with a diverse range of films and film events.
Leni aspires to achieve a PhD in Environmental humanities.
Reseach Interests
- Environmental humanities and the Anthropocene
- Literary and Film studies and criticism
- Speculative fiction and futurities, climate fiction, (New) weird fiction, and ecohorror
- Intersectional feminist theory and criticism, and critical theory
- Human rights
My master’s thesis is entitled “Black Speculations: Embodying Geography and Re-Visioning the Future in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy.” The project examines the way Jemisin employs flesh and land in her trilogy, and by what means these embodiments provide tools for imagening futures beyond the wake of slavery. The thesis asks: how can the present be emancipated from pastness? To what degree do interactions between flesh and land provoke alterations? And what purpose does examining past histories hold when imagining futurities? The thesis is framed by Afrofuturism, literary and critical theory, and Katherine McKittrick's and Christina Sharpe's seminal works on literature, Black feminist geographies, and the aftermath of slavery.