CCIT Talk 'Monsters and the more than human' with Rasmus Daugbjerg

It is a bit of a truism to state that we as academics can learn from fiction writers. It’s maybe another thing to implement it. This spring however, we offer you a space to explore that further.

On March 10th, the acclaimed Danish author Rasmus Daugbjerg will join us for a talk titled "Monsters and the more-than-human":

What are monsters? In our Western societies, we draw sharp lines between humans and anything or anyone we perceive as less-than-human. We have tended to imagine ourselves as the center of a world revolving around us. The climate crisis has exposed the malicious impacts of this thinking - we as humans are part of large systems with other creatures and entities, and many of these dynamics are much less under our control than we had imagined. Rasmus Daugbjerg, along with others, proposes the "more-than-human" as a lens to understand these intricate entanglements. What happens, he asks, when we look at our world and at ourselves from the perspectives of these more-than-humans? What if we give those we have for centuries called "monsters" center stage?

Rasmus Daugbjerg is a Danish writer of fiction. He has graduated from the Swedish school Biskops Arnö and the Danish Academy for Creative Writing. He made his debut in 2021 with the novel The Rumour and his second novel Troll was published the year after. His work is inspired by fairy tales and myths, and he uses these genres as mirrors to investigate questions of nature, climate and biodiversity crisis, ecology, interspecies relationships and monstrous creatures. Rasmus Daugbjerg’s works have been nominated to several prizes including Jørgen Munch-Christensens Debutant Prize, Montanas Litteraturpris, The Karen Blixen Prize and in 2023 he won the Michael Strunge Prize. Daugbjerg has taught creative writing in the psychiatric system and at multiple writing schools. He is currently a Velux writer-in-residence at the H. C. Andersen Center at Southern University of Denmark. Read more