معرفی
Johan Laurits Tønnesson is a Professor of Non-fiction Research at the Institute for Linguistic and Nordic Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. His academic career spans over two decades at the university, where he has developed expertise at the intersection of language studies, literature, and media. Tønnesson holds a permanent position as a full professor, teaching courses in rhetoric, non-fiction, and plain language communication.
Tønnesson's research interests focus on Nordic language, rhetoric, non-fiction/sakprosa research, and plain language communication. His work examines non-fiction across multiple contexts - from parliamentary reports and newspapers to job advertisements and legal documents. He approaches non-fiction as both published literary works and functional texts with practical applications in society.
His publication record shows consistent scholarly output with 15 recent publications analyzed here spanning from 2010 to 2019. These works demonstrate his focus on multimodal communication, historical non-fiction analysis, and the relationship between rhetoric and societal functions. His research often employs text-historical approaches and topos analysis to understand how non-fiction shapes and reflects cultural values.
- Editor-in-chief of the Nordic scholarly journal Sakprosa since 2009
- Editor-in-chief of Sakprosasiden.no, a platform for non-fiction research discussion
- Editor of the non-fiction research bibliography Sakbib.no
- Recipient of recognition from the Faculty of Humanities for the social significance of his work (2017)
Tønnesson has supervised numerous PhD candidates, including main supervision for Øistein Hide and Ida Seljeseth (2020), and previously for Jan Grue (2012), Gudrun Kløve Juuhl (2014), and Ommund Vareberg (2019). He has led multiple research projects including 'Communicative Circuitry of the Green Shift' (2018-2020), 'Nordic Non-fiction' (2018-2019), and the long-running 'Research Network Norwegian Factual Prose' (since 2000). In 2019, he developed the BA program 'Klart språk' (Plain Language) and teaches related courses connecting language studies with legal security and democratic participation.
