Mikkel Krause Frantzen

Mikkel Krause Frantzen is an Associate Professor in Environmental Aesthetics at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen (UCPH), where he has held a permanent position since 2023. He serves as Co-PI on the VELUX-funded research project 'OIKOS: Care and Crisis in the 21st Century' and is affiliated with the Green Solutions Centre's Thematic Solution on 'Health'. Frantzen is also a Humboldt Fellow (2023-2024) at Humboldt University in Berlin and maintains an active role as a literary critic at Politiken and contributor to The Los Angeles Review of Books.

His academic journey began with a BA in Comparative Literature from UCPH in 2009, followed by an MA in 2012, and culminated in a PhD in 2017 with the dissertation 'Going Nowhere, Slow – Scenes of Depression in Contemporary Literature and Culture'. His postdoctoral work included a Carlsberg Foundation grant examining 'The Culture of Grief' at Aalborg University.

Frantzen's research represents a sophisticated intersection of contemporary cultural theory, environmental humanities, and critical finance studies. His work consistently explores how aesthetic and cultural forms respond to and shape our understanding of multiple contemporary crises: ecological collapse, financialization, and mental health epidemics. He has developed a distinctive theoretical framework connecting depression as both personal experience and political condition, while his more recent work on environmental aesthetics examines climate grief, representations of oil and plastics, and the concept of the hyperabject. His scholarship reveals how financialization has permeated cultural production, particularly through his analyses of the financial thriller genre and its relationship to 1970s economic transformations.

His scholarly output demonstrates remarkable thematic consistency while expanding into new territory. The 15 most recent publications reveal three interconnected strands: ecological aesthetics (particularly climate grief and material ecocriticism), finance fiction (analyzing representations of financialization), and affective politics (focusing on depression, melancholy, and utopian desire). These strands increasingly converge in his recent work, reflecting his argument that contemporary crises must be analyzed as interconnected phenomena rather than isolated issues.

Frantzen has successfully secured significant external funding, including the VELUX Foundation's Core Group Programme for 'OIKOS' (2023-2026) and the Danish Independent Research Fund for 'Finance Fiction' (2018-2022). His Humboldt Fellowship (2023-2024) at Humboldt University in Berlin represents continued international recognition of his scholarly contributions. While formal advising relationships aren't explicitly detailed in his CV, his extensive teaching experience across multiple courses at UCPH demonstrates his commitment to academic mentorship.

He actively contributes to interdisciplinary scholarly networks through co-organizing seminars and lecture series such as '&Utopia' featuring prominent thinkers like Kim Stanley Robinson, and through his role as co-editor of special journal issues including 'Finance and Fiction' for boundary2. His leadership in the 'Finance Fiction' research collective demonstrates his capacity to build collaborative research environments that bridge disciplinary boundaries between literary studies, economics, and cultural theory.