A Brief History of the Centre for Ibsen Studies

The phenomenon of the academic center devoted to the study of a single influential cultural figure has largely been accepted without much notice. We take for granted the notion that there are good reasons to fund a Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, a Hans Christian Andersen Centre at the University of Southern Denmark, or a Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo. While there is increasing scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the author museum, with its strong association with tourism and the promotion of experiential connections with authors and texts in their presumed authentic contexts (e.g. Watson 2006; Hendrix 2008; Spring and Schimanski 2020), research institutes dedicated to single authors have been taken at face value. There has been little interest in exploring how they shape the popular and scholarly receptions of the authors to whom they are dedicated. In this article, I trace the development of the Centre for Ibsen Studies (CIS) with special attention paid to strategic decisions made throughout the course of its thirty-year history and the influences these have had on the field as a whole.

In 2023, CIS reached its thirtieth year of operation. While this anniversary passed without fanfare, it has provided an opportunity to reflect on the center’s history. In addition to the mandated tasks of research, documentation, teaching, and public outreach that the center staff have carried out over the past three decades, CIS has hosted myriad guest researchers, produced significant doctoral dissertations, contributed to the organization of multiple conferences and seminars, published books in the Acta Ibseniana series, and edited the journal Ibsen Studies since its inauguration in 2000. In preparing this overview of why and how CIS was founded, the actors involved in its development, and its contributions to the field of Ibsen studies, I have primarily consulted archived internal University of Oslo documents.

Today CIS is a small unit within the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, which in turn is part of the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Humanities. The center has its own director, budget, and advisory board, which, along with the fact that it maintains a close formal collaboration with the National Library of Norway, marks it as distinct from other units across the university. The center’s relative autonomy is a direct result of its unusual origins. The current permanent staff consists of four full-time faculty members with teaching and research responsibilities, one full-time position dedicated to developing and maintaining the center’s digital resources, one part-time librarian responsible for the center’s physical collection, and one limited-term director, who throughout most of the center’s history has been recruited from among its permanent staff. In addition, at any given time the center has a number of part-time research assistants and Ph.D. fellows.

The idea for an institution dedicated to the study of Henrik Ibsen began to take shape in the 1980s, although it had been discussed in Norway since at least the 1930s, according to one source (Straume 1993, 41). In 1988 Riksbibliotekstjenesten (The National Library Service) appointed a working group to explore the idea further. This working group presented a report to the University of Oslo’s board in March 1990, which resulted in the formal decision to establish such a center. Originally, the center was envisioned as having three primary objectives: the development of an archive of newspaper clippings, the creation of an Ibsen concordance, and the recreation of Henrik Ibsen’s book collection, which had not been preserved intact after the dramatist’s death. In retrospect, this was a singularly unambitious set of objectives compared to what the center went on to become. The idea of creating a concordance was almost immediately abandoned because a similar project was already underway at the University of Bergen, eventually resulting in a six-volume book publication. Nonetheless, the university board ultimately did recognize the need for a much more ambitiously conceived center, concluding that: “Norway—as Ibsen’s homeland—has a special duty to assist students and researchers from all countries who wish to work with Ibsen’s works.”¹ Thus, from its very inception the Centre for Ibsen Studies was conceived as fulfilling a unique national responsibility for meeting the needs of the global Ibsen community.

To get the process going at the University of Oslo, an interim board consisting of five members was established in the spring of 1990: university director Kjell Stahl (replaced on the interim board by Stein Arne Nilsen only a few months after it was constituted), professor Otto Hageberg, professor Bjørn Hemmer, Anne Grete Holm Olsen from the University Library, Bendik Rugaas from The National Library Service, and Stein Winge, the director of the National Theater at the time. The make-up of this board reflects the center’s unique combination of bibliographical documentation, scholarship, and live performance culture. While documentation has been mandated from the very inception of the center, this has also complicated its status as an academic unit, since the existence of a physical collection and the close collaboration with what is today the National Library has few if any other counterparts in Norwegian higher education. From the beginning, the center has had librarians on its permanent staff, and many scholars from around the world will likely remember being assisted by Randi Meyer or Maria Faskerti, who worked at the center throughout the first two decades of the 2000s; since 2019 senior librarian Kristin Kosberg has had sole responsibility for the physical collection and the center’s collaboration with the National Library, including the International Ibsen Bibliography. It may be helpful to point out that significant changes in the library system have taken place in the years since the center was founded. In the early 1990s, the University Library was located at Solli Place in Oslo, at some distance from the main University of Oslo campus at Blindern. In the late 1990s, the University Library moved to a new building at Blindern, and the newly reorganized National Library of Norway took over both the Solli Place site and many of the special collections—including the Ibsen collection—that had previously been housed by the University Library. This means that when the center was established, it was a natural choice to dedicate office space to it in the Solli Place building.

Phase 1: 1992–1999

The interim board’s 1990 report to the main governing board of the University of Oslo presents a much more rigorous and ambitious vision for what a center for Ibsen studies might look like than what had been outlined in previous planning documents. The interim board saw a clear need to expand the Ibsen collection to include Ibsen research from outside Norway, as well as translations of his works to other languages. Moreover, the interim board emphasized the need for “openness regarding new research questions that will make it possible to make it the central research center in an international context.” The “initiation of new research” was to be a “central element” and the importance of maintaining both a high standard of research and scholarly autonomy was emphasized. The interim board anticipated the need for the center to collaborate with cultural institutions both in Norway and abroad, including theaters, libraries, publishing houses, and “culturally interested” corporations, in part as a means of securing external funding for research and research dissemination. The University of Oslo’s board deliberated over the interim board’s report and ultimately approved the establishment of a Centre for Ibsen Studies in 1991. The center commenced its activities in the spring of 1992, although the opening ceremony took place a year later, on 7 May 1993. In addition to speeches, the occasion was celebrated with a concert of Ibsen’s songs set to Edvard Grieg’s music that was broadcast live on NRK Radio, the national broadcast network (Adresseavisen 1993, 7 May).

Astrid Sæther was the first director of the center, serving continuously from 1992 to 2001. She has distinguished herself through her biographical research on the women in Ibsen’s life, including the books Suzannah, fru Ibsen (Sæther 2008; Suzannah, Mrs. Ibsen) and I skyggen av Ibsen. Dikterens unge kvinner. En historie om kunst, makt og begjær (2022; In the Shadow of Ibsen: The Poet’s Young Women. A History of Art, Power and Desire). She has also edited or co-edited a number of anthologies published in the center’s Acta Ibseniana series. She was joined by professor Asbjørn Aarseth from the University of Bergen, who held the first so-called “Professor II” position at the center; this is a 20% limited-term position intended to bring in expertise from outside the University of Oslo, and the scholars who have served in the role of Professor II have had a significant impact on the center’s research profile. Together with professor Vigdis Ystad, Aarseth was a major contributor to the planning and execution of Henrik Ibsens skrifter, and his Ibsens samtidsskuespill: En studie i glasskapets dramaturgi (1999; Ibsen’s contemporary plays: a study in the dramaturgy of the glass cabinet) was published during his time at the center.

Of particular interest, given the center’s current concentration on digital documentation, is the interim board’s emphasis on the future importance of the digital humanities. They recommended the development of an admittedly vaguely conceived Ibsen “database” and envisioned what they called the “humanities computing group” at the University of Oslo as a natural partner for collaboration. Similarly, in tune with today’s center, the interim board also stressed the necessity of internationalizing Ibsen research and argued that this could play a key role in the University of Oslo’s broader internationalization strategy. The focus on internationalization is in large part the origin of the center’s liberal policy for hosting guest researchers and its previously generous funding of conference travel for scholars from developing countries, a program that sadly has not been possible to maintain. A strong interdisciplinary profile was also viewed as important, and this was to be cultivated through collaboration with relevant disciplines within the Faculty of Humanities, such as media and communication, theater studies, and musicology. The university director’s report from February 1991 is even more ambitious, suggesting collaborations with disciplines such as linguistics, sociology, and psychology.

Phase 2: 1999–2004

Based on the successes of the center’s first phase, the University of Oslo’s board (“Kollegiet”) approved the extension of CIS for a second phase on 30 September 1997. In this decision, the board underscored that the CIS mandate consisted of three primary activities: documentation, research, and dissemination. During this second phase, the mandate would be expanded to include teaching as well. The university board constituted a new working group with the task of creating a new CIS strategy for the period 1999–2004. The committee consisted of Sæther, section head Elisabeth Eide from the National Library, and three professors from the University of Oslo whose names will be familiar to many Ibsen scholars, Fredrik Engelstad Helge Rønning, and Vigdis Ystad.

This working group was unambiguous in its description of the centrality of documentation for CIS, writing that “The documentation materials are the foundation for all activity at the center.” They underscored the close connection between bibliographical work and documentation, commenting that these are “to a great degree two sides of the same coin.” On this basis, the working group identified the further development of the physical collection and the registration of sources in the International Ibsen Bibliography as the most important activities connected to documentation.

Regarding research, the working group is unambiguous in prioritizing a project that had only recently received funding from the Research Council of Norway (RCN), “Henrik Ibsens skrifter” (the writings of Henrik Ibsen), which was to be led by Ystad: “Research is the center’s most central task: this activity is divided into two main areas, the edition project ‘Henrik Ibsens skrifter’ and other research.” The working group defines “other research” vaguely as “independent of the edition project” and carried out by anyone connected to the center. They comment that the research profile of the future center director would influence the direction that research at the center was to take. It was not until 2001 that a new center director, Knut Brynhildsvoll, was recruited, so the working group from 1998 only suggests that future research should be concentrated on “areas such as text and context, theater studies, and interdisciplinary studies.”

When it comes to what would come to be known as Henrik Ibsens skrifter, as far back as 1990, the interim board’s report had mentioned what they called a “new edition” of the existing critical edition of Henrik Ibsen’s complete works, the so-called “hundreårsutgaven” (the centenary edition) edited by Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip and published between 1928 and 1957. Eventually a much larger and more ambitious project aimed at producing an entirely new scholarly edition under the leadership of Ystad would play a crucial role in almost every aspect of CIS for many years to come. This project overlapped with and indeed extended well beyond the second CIS phase, lasting from 1999 to 2010, with the last of the sixteen volumes published by the Aschehoug publishing house in 2011. Separate funding from Norsk kulturråd (Norwegian cultural council) was secured to finance the publication (2009–2011).

With the large increase in the number of temporary staff associated with HIS, the center moved from a few desks tucked away in the old University Library building at Solli Place into elegant offices in the nearby Observatory, which was built in 1833 and owned by the University of Oslo. CIS was granted the use of this space for the duration of the HIS grant period of ten years. The question of a permanent home for the center was not fully resolved until 2009, when it was finally relocated to the Henrik Wergeland building on the University of Oslo’s Blindern campus.

Ystad explains the need for a new critical scholarly edition on the basis of the substantive differences in the overarching approach compared to the centenary edition:

The justification for the establishment of the new edition is based in reception history and sociology. The presentation of the literary texts in HIS is not built on the intention of the author but aims instead for the most reliable establishment of historically authentic texts in the form they had when they first met the public and became the object of reception by readers and theatergoers. […] This understanding of the textual material, based as it is on reception history, also guides the edition’s commentary practices. The commentaries are intended to recreate as much as possible the horizon of understanding in which the text was created and received. (Ystad 2010, 11)

And indeed, this more contextual approach is reflected in the scholarly profiles of a number of the members of the HIS team, including Ståle Dingstad, Nina Evensen, Narve Fulsås, Christian Janss, Aina Nøding, and Ellen N. Wiger. The broader impact of the HIS project, at least in Norwegian Ibsen scholarship, goes well beyond the creation of a high-quality critical scholarly edition that includes material not previously published. On the one hand, the fact that the large number of early-career scholars working on the project were drilled in the importance of reception, the sociology of literature, and edition philology has led to a flowering of research influenced by these methods as these scholars later established their academic careers. On the other hand, the aim of making the edition accessible online has prompted an ambitious strategy for retooling the documentation work carried out at the center for the digital age.

Notably, the working group of 1998 is quite clear in its discussion of dissemination that teaching was not included in the center’s mandate, writing “The center itself should not offer instruction, but instead give feedback to and participate in the planning and implementation of instruction in Ibsen-related courses offered by the university’s departments.” Dissemination was to take the form of research publications, regular international Ibsen conferences, smaller seminars, and public outreach in various forums. Nonetheless, the center did establish an English-language master’s program by the end of phase two, accepting its first group of students in the fall of 2004. The establishment of an English-language master’s program in Ibsen Studies marks a substantial reorientation in the center’s resources. This 120-ECTS-credit program typically attracts between five and fifteen new students each year; the groups are extremely diverse, both in terms of disciplinary background and country of origin.

The course offerings have expanded over the years. In the fall of 2004, the center offered three courses: IBS4101 “Ibsen’s Oeuvre in a Biographical, Aesthetic and Historical Perspective,” IBS4010 “Introduction to Information Resources in Ibsen Studies,” and IBS4020 “Methods and Theory in Ibsen Studies.” In updated form, these courses remain core required courses for the program: IBS4101 has become “Ibsen’s Works: History, Text, Performance” and IBS4010 was expanded to create IBS4000 “Research Ethics, Information Resources, and Advanced Academic Writing for Ibsen Studies.” IBS4020 was also expanded and moved to the spring semester to create IBS4001 “Theoretical, Methodological, and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ibsen Studies.” The two courses that were offered spring semester 2005, IBS4102 “Henrik Ibsen’s Oeuvre in the Perspective of its Reception History” and IBS4103 “Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov – the Rise of Modern Drama” are no longer required courses but are still offered in significantly revised formats. The latter is now taught in Norwegian under the title IBS4220 “Ibsen og det moderne drama” (Ibsen and the modern drama).

In 2002, the center gained a new Professor II, Atle Kittang from the University of Bergen, who was Norway’s first professor of comparative literature. His Ibsens heroisme: Frå Brand til Når vi døde vågner (Ibsen’s heroism: From Brand to When We Dead Awaken) was published the same year he joined the center, where he remained an important contributor until stepping down in 2011.

Regarding scholarly dissemination, the working group of 1998 recommended the establishment of an international journal of Ibsen studies and a book series. Both of these goals were achieved during this second phase. For many years Norwegian Ibsen scholars published their work in the Ibsenårbok (Ibsen yearbook), which was edited by first Einar Østvedt (1952–1962) and then Daniel Haakonsen (1963–1972). Starting in 1966 Haakonsen also started producing the more internationally oriented Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen series, which appeared irregularly until 1997, Bjørn Hemmer and Vigdis Ystad having taken over the editorship in 1988. In the year 2000, CIS established a new iteration, the journal Ibsen Studies, in collaboration with the Taylor & Francis publishing house. The journal’s editorial team is comprised of the academic staff at CIS, which is advised by an international board. The journal strictly follows double-blind peer review practices and aims to publish articles on all aspects of Ibsen studies broadly conceived. Through the process of vetting and editing article submissions, the CIS staff are continually exposed to new developments in Ibsen studies, which in turn influences the teaching and research carried out at the center. In addition, the center has published a number of monographs and proceedings volumes in its Acta Ibseniana series.

Interlude: The 2006 Ibsen Jubilee

2006 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of Ibsen’s death, with celebratory activities planned around the globe. In a scathing summary of the year’s events with the evocative title “Ute av kontroll: Ibsen-året i skyggen av pyramidene” (Out of control: the Ibsen year in the shadow of the pyramids), Tore Rem is sharply critical of many of the activities that took place during this “Ibsen Year,” but he also registers a number of more academic contributions that resulted from this intensive focus on Ibsen: “The opening of the Ibsen Museum, the publication of Henrik Ibsens skrifter, more activity at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, the scope of information available at Ibsen.net, all of this can be seen as resources for what has traditionally been an anti-intellectual Norwegian theater” (Rem 2007, 137). Rem sees the improvements in physical and digital documentation and groundbreaking new scholarship as among the most positive outcomes of what he otherwise views as Norway’s rather megalomaniacal celebration of itself through the avatar of Ibsen (Rem 2007, 139).

The center’s main contribution to this jubilee was to organize an International Ibsen Conference in Oslo in June of that year, with an accompanying proceedings volume. This volume, edited by Frode Helland, Kaja S. Mollerin, Jon Nygaard, and Astrid Sæther, was published in the Acta Ibseniana series under the title The Living Ibsen in 2007. As the editors write, “Covering not only theatrical, textual, audible and visual aspects of the plays, but also political, cultural and ideological aspects of the living Ibsen, in text and performance, the papers held at the conference gave a good impression of the wide range of issues and methodologies which is characteristic of contemporary Ibsen studies around the world” (Helland et al. 2007, 3).

Knut Brynhildsvoll was at the helm of the center throughout the planning period for the Ibsen jubilee, officially stepping down on 31 December 2006. Brynhildsvoll had two periods of research leave during his tenure, and both Astrid Sæther and Tom Eide stepped in as temporary replacements for him during these leaves of absence. On 1 August 2006, Frode Helland became the new center director for what was to be three consecutive periods, with Ståle Dingstad serving as acting director during Helland’s research leave in 2011. Helland had defended the first Norwegian Ph.D. dissertation on Ibsen since Åse Hiorth Lervik’s in 1971, “Melankoliens spill: En studie i Henrik Ibsens siste skuespill” (The play of melancholy: A study of Ibsen’s late plays) in 1997, with Ystad as his main advisor. After first teaching at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Helland took a position as professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Oslo in 2004. He was thus a natural and highly qualified successor to the director position, and as the 1998 working group predicted, his research interests did indeed come to influence the direction the center was to take during much of phase three, especially regarding the internationalization of Ibsen studies.

Phase 3: 2007–Present

To my knowledge, there was no formal evaluation of the center’s second phase, and correspondingly no new formal strategy document for what I have nonetheless chosen to call phase three. This period is characterized by three developments: extraordinary success in acquiring external funding for a groundbreaking new research project, a highly ambitious program for expanding the center’s digital resources, and a changing of the guard, with the retirement of Jon Nygaard, Astrid Sæther, and Vigdis Ystad within a few short years of one another. The interdisciplinarity of CIS had been augmented when the unfortunate decision to eliminate the University of Oslo’s program in theater studies led to the transfer of professor Jon Nygaard to the center in 2005. With Nygaard, the center gained expertise in theater history, an area that had previously not received much attention, as well as a significantly revised understanding of Ibsen’s early life in the book «…af stort est du kommen»: Henrik Ibsen og Skien (2013; “Born of greatness”: Henrik Ibsen and Skien). This concentration was further enhanced by the hiring of the acclaimed theater historian, professor Erika Fischer-Lichte, in a professor II at CIS from 2008 until her retirement in 2017.

CIS also underwent a few existential crises during this third phase, including the question of where it was to be located and how it was to be funded. Negotiations concerning a permanent location for the center heated up as the HIS project came to a close and CIS had to vacate the luxurious offices of the Observatory. There were contentious debates in the media and internally at CIS. The move to the Blindern campus was viewed by some as detrimental because it entailed the loss of the Observatory offices and proximity to what was by now the National Library, as well as a perceived loss of autonomy. On the other side of the debate, closer integration within a department at the Faculty of Humanities was seen as having the potential to increase and improve research and teaching collaboration with relevant sections, such as the Scandinavian literature section. Ultimately it was decided that CIS would become a semi-autonomous unit within the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies.

In its initial report from 1990, the interim board emphasized the need for the center to seek external funding, and this is an area where the academic staff have consistently produced good results. Building on the success of the “Henrik Ibsens skrifter” project (1997–2006), the center was awarded funding for additional substantial externally-funded projects. Frode Helland received RCN funding for “Ibsen Between Cultures” (2008–2013). This project created the opportunity to examine the global reception and reinvention of Ibsen and resulted in Ph.D. dissertations on the reception of Ibsen in Asia and Africa by Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman (2012), Liyang Xia (2013), Sabiha Huq (2014), and Solace Sefakor Anku (2020). The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Norwegian Literature Abroad co-sponsored “Ibsen in Translation” (2008–2020), which facilitated the translation of Ibsen’s twelve social dramas directly from the original language into eight key languages: classical and Egyptian Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This project was also led by Helland, and along with “Ibsen Between Cultures” it reflects his sustained efforts to take seriously the global reception of Ibsen and create a far more inclusive and interdisciplinary field. This perspective was further enhanced in 2017, with the hiring of Giuliano D’Amico, who specializes in translation studies and the European reception of Ibsen.

One of the most important innovations to take place during this third phase was the creation of a relational event-based database that gathered metadata on performances of Ibsen’s plays around the world, IbsenStage. IbsenStage was built on the model of AusStage and launched in 2014. Whereas AusStage seeks to collect metadata on performance culture of all kinds that is staged within the nation borders of Australia, IbsenStage takes an opposite approach, seeking to document all known performances of the works of a single dramatist—Ibsen—from around the globe. There has been a long-standing mutually beneficial collaboration between AusStage and IbsenStage made official by the hiring of professor Julie Holledge, who had spearheaded AusStage, in a professor II at CIS, which she held between 2011 and 2020. Holledge’s expertise as a professor of theater studies significantly strengthened the center’s emphasis on performance studies and digital humanities methods, and her legacy at CIS was guaranteed in 2022, with the hiring of Liyang Xia, who has expertise in both performance studies and digital humanities as an associate professor. Moreover, IbsenStage enabled three doctoral dissertations that pioneered computational approaches to the global reception of Ibsen by Jens-Morten Hanssen (2017), Gianina Druta (2019), and Svein Henrik Nyhus (2019).

The center experienced a significant challenge in 2018 when the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Humanities chose to reevaluate the model for financing CIS activities. Because of its mandated documentation, CIS does not fit the standard model for financing academic programs at institutions of higher education in Norway, necessitating substantial earmarks to fund documentation at CIS. It initially appeared that the faculty wished to cut these earmarks, and the center was given four years to retool. During this period, Helland stepped down as center director to become dean of the Faculty of Humanities and professor Ellen Rees, who was hired in 2013, was appointed to a four-year term as center director. During her term, the focus has been on strengthening the center’s income streams, both through improving the master’s program and through acquisition of external funding, and on more aggressively prioritizing digital forms of documentation.

The master’s program in Ibsen Studies continues to thrive. As of the fall of 2021, students have the option of choosing between writing a traditional 60-ECTS-credit master’s thesis or an internship option that combines work experience with a shorter 30-ECTS-credit master’s thesis. Until 2016, the Norwegian Ministry of Education had a generous quota system with grants that made it possible for economically challenged students from less-wealthy countries to study in Norway. In 2022 the government implemented tuition fees for students coming to Norway from outside the European Union, which is another blow to the center’s aim of attracting a truly diverse and global group of students. Nonetheless, we continue to attract students from around the world, from countries such as Bangladesh, China, the Republic of Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Iran, Italy, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Moreover, the center is planning to launch a new, entirely digital version of the master’s program in order to reach students around the world who for various reasons are unable to study in Norway. The idea for such a program arose during the covid-19 pandemic and it allows CIS to make maximum use of its by now extensive digital holdings in the context of instruction.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the field of Ibsen studies looks different now, in 2023, than it did in 1992. The question is the degree to which the Centre for Ibsen Studies has made a positive contribution to these developments. Happily, many of the original ambitions of the center have come to pass. CIS is at the cutting edge when it comes to digital documentation and the goal of real interdisciplinarity has been nurtured. The critical scholarly edition of Ibsen’s writings and the growth of international perspectives on Ibsen studies are perhaps the two greatest overarching contributions of the center. While the establishment of a master’s program had in some ways diverted attention and resources away from the original mandate of documentation, research, and dissemination, it has also provided a fruitful arena for the exchange of ideas and has allowed the center to train students from around the world and prepare them for careers in the cultural sector.

It seems clear that there are four areas within Ibsen studies that can be traced directly to the interests and activities that are currently being fostered at CIS: reception studies, performance studies, adaptation studies, and digital approaches. One might add that center staff members have made significant contributions to biographical and theater historical research, and the effects of intensive edition philological work grounded in reception are also long-lasting. While there is still a great deal of Ibsen research carried out without direct reference to work done at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, it is increasingly difficult to produce new work without acknowledgement of at least some of the highly diverse results it has generated. These developments have unfolded hand in hand with the journal Ibsen Studies, whose pages represent an important archive for the Centre for Ibsen Studies in themselves.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ellen Rees

Ellen Rees is a professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Ibsen Studies, where she served as its director from 2020–2023. She has published two books on Ibsen, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning (2014) and Den populærkulturelle Ibsen: En studie i nyere norsk resepsjon (2023) in addition to a number of articles on Ibsen and other topics within Norwegian literature and film. She is currently the holds an European Research Council advanced grant, “Norwegian Romantic Nationalism (NORN)” (2023–2027).

Notes

1 This and all other translations are my own.