Kristoffer Noheden

Kristoffer Noheden is a researcher in cinema studies in the Department of Media Studies. He holds a PhD in cinema studies from Stockholm University, and an MA in film studies and a BA in cultural studies from the University of Gothenburg. He has been Northern Scholars Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh (autumn 2019), and Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Potsdam (October 2017 to July 2018).

Noheden has a background as a freelance writer, a literary translator, and an editor at the surrealist-oriented small press Sphinx Bokförlag.

Kristoffer Noheden is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose research straddles art history, cinema studies, comparative literature, and esotericism studies. His main focus is surrealism across the art forms. Noheden's monograph, Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), examines post-war surrealist cinema in relation to the movement's change in direction following World War II towards the search for a new myth. The book turns to art history, aesthetics, and esotericism studies to explore the development of surrealist film beyond the canonical interwar period.

He is also the author of more than twenty articles and book chapters on surrealist exhibitions, surrealism and film theory, animals and ecology in surrealism, and Lars von Trier's films.

Noheden's broader research interests include documentary film, experimental ethnography, the history of film theory, the impact of occultism on modernism and media, exhibition history, ecocriticism, animal studies, and practice-based research.

Noheden's current research project concerns animals and ecology in international surrealism from 1919 to 2018. The project will result in a monograph tentatively titled Excursions in the Night Side of Nature: Surrealism and Ecology. It is funded with a three-year grant from the Swedish Research Council.

Parallel to this, Noheden continues researching surrealism, film, and mythology. The volume Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries, co-edited with Abigail Susik (forthcoming with Manchester University Press), gathers leading and emerging scholars with inventive approaches to the history, historiography, and diverse expression of surrealist cinema. Another volume on surrealism and myth, co-edited with Daniel Zamani, examines under-explored examples of surrealism's historically changing approach to mythology.

Noheden is also guest co-curator of the research-based exhibition Alan Glass: Surrealism's Secret at Leeds Arts University, to open September 2020.