Oscar von Seth

Postdoktor vid Centrum för genusvetenskap

E-post:: oscar.von.seth@gender.uu.se
Besöksadress:: Villavägen 6A
752 36 UPPSALA
Postadress:: Box 527
751 20 Uppsala

Ladda ned kontaktuppgifter för Oscar von Seth vid Centrum för genusvetenskap

ORCID:: 0000-0002-6291-3257

Kort presentation

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Gender Research (currently placed at the Department of History, King’s College London).

My research interests are at the intersection of literature, cinema, and queer theories. Beyond that, I am interested in masculinities, disability studies, human-animal studies, and the homosexual emancipation movement in the German-speaking world before WW2.

My recent research concerns narrative representations of the AIDS epidemic.

Nyckelord

Biografi

Before venturing into academia, I worked in theatre as a prompter and assistant director to Lars Norén. I also have a background as a contemporary dancer. In 2014, I was awarded second place in Umeå novellpris, Sweden's biggest competition for short stories, and in 2017, I debuted as a novelist with Snö som föll i fjol (Yesterday's News, Calidris).

I got my PhD in Comparative Literature in 2022 with the dissertation Outsiders and Others: Queer Friendships in Novels by Hermann Hesse. Before commencing my current postdoc project (in January 2024), I taught in Gender Studies and at the Police Training Program at Södertörn University, and in Comparative Literature at Umeå University.

Alongside my research, I supervise MA essays and occasionally participate in public discourse about queer representation in media.

Forskning

Current research:

My postdoc project, “Queer Waiting in Literature and Film” (funded by the Swedish Research Council), poses the question if waiting, a universal human activity and an unavoidable aspect of life, can be understood as a queer cultural phenomenon. The project proposes “queer waiting,” a new theoretical concept in Queer Studies that is developed by tracing and exploring entanglements of queerness and waiting in a diverse selection of fictional and autobiographical queer-themed narratives. In its most broad definition, queer waiting is waiting experienced by queer people. More specifically, queer waiting is a form of waiting that is entwined with what makes people queer, like gender nonconformity, norm-challenging sexualities, and forms of kinship that challenge heteronormative relationality. Broadly, the project proposes that while waiting, to everyone, can make the present seem unbearable, queers experience it, and handle it, in unique ways. The project will result in a monograph that is to be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.

For further reading, see “Queer Waiting in Michael Cunningham's The Hours” (Lambda Nordica, 2025) and “A Bad Gay Waiting for Vengeance: Ellie in The Last of Us Part II” (REDEN, 2025).

Previous research:

In my dissertation Outsiders and Others (2022), I examine friendships between men in novels by Hermann Hesse. Male friendship is a key theme for Hesse, one of the most widely read German-language authors of the twentieth century and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hesse’s protagonists are usually depicted as outsiders who come to know themselves in an intimate bond with another man. The friend is almost always portrayed as rebellious, beautiful, enigmatic, and inspiring, and comes to play a key role in the protagonist’s personal development and journey through life. Outsiders and Others draws on queer theories and queer concepts to explore how characters in Hesse’s fiction intersect with and connote queerness—such as homoeroticism and non-conformism—and argues that the friendships at the center of Hesse’s stories are “queer friendships” that challenge heteronormative conceptions of relationality, sexuality, and desire.

For further reading, see my dissertation, Outsiders and Others (2022) and “Tracing the Wolf in Hermann Hesse's Der Steppenwolf” (from the anthology Squirrelling, 2022).

In 2018, I participated in the foundation of Ratatoskr Research Group for Literary Animal Studies at Södertörn University.

My earliest research includes a queer reading of Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants novel series, the first of its kind. That article (in Swedish) can be found here.