Louisa Olufsen Layne

Louisa Olufsen Layne is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo, with a focus on African diasporic literatures and aesthetics. She leads the Research Council of Norway-funded project Word, Sound and Power: The Lyrical Making of African Diaspora Futures (2023–2026) and previously conducted postdoctoral research on Harlem Renaissance subversions of high/low culture distinctions.

• Education: DPhil in English (PhD) from University of Oxford; MA in Comparative Literature from University of Oslo.

Her research spans African American, Caribbean, and Black British literatures, postcolonial theory, modernism, and the interplay of lyrics, popular music, and black radical traditions. She has published on Langston Hughes, Kamau Brathwaite, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, emphasizing sociological critiques of taste and urban aesthetic resistance.

Recent publications include articles in African American Review and book chapters on sound systems in poetry and cultural intersections. Her work explores how literature and music shape imagined communities and challenge structural inequalities.

Layne has held teaching roles at the University of Oslo, University of Oxford, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Stanford University's Oxford Programme, supervising courses on Black British writers, Caribbean women’s writing, and race representations.

She co-convened interdisciplinary lecture series such as Black Poesis (Fritt Ord and Anders Jahres fund) and Race and Resistance Across Borders (TORCH, Oxford). She also serves on Art Council Norway's Research and Development Committee.