Ann-Sofie Persson is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at Linköping University, affiliated with the Department of Communication, Literature and Swedish (KLS) within the Department of Culture and Society (IKOS). She is an active member of the Research Environment for Language and Culture, focusing on the interplay between language and culture in various contexts. Her educational background includes a Magisterexamen in Literary Studies from Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris (1995) and a PhD in French with a literary focus from Ohio State University (2001). She earned her Docent (Associate Professor) qualification in Language and Culture in 2015. Dr. Persson's research centers on the ideological dimensions of fiction from postcolonial, ecocritical, and gender perspectives. She has extensively studied autobiographical writing, particularly by female authors from the French-speaking Caribbean and North Africa, including Nina Bouraoui, Fabienne Kanor, Leïla Sebbar, Yanick Lahen, Maryse Condé, and Gisèle Pineau. Her work also explores horse books through ecocritical and posthumanist lenses, examining how horses are portrayed with human characteristics or as fundamentally different from humans. She has co-founded research projects on human-animal relations in children's cultures and has conducted interview studies with high school students about fan fiction practices. Her recent publications reveal a strong focus on mothering variations in horse book series, fan fiction in literature education, and auto-fictional practices in Caribbean literature. The research shows consistent engagement with narrative voice, identity construction, and the intersection of human-animal relationships in literary contexts. As an educator, she has developed and taught numerous courses including Autobiographical Texts, Literature and Gender, Postcolonial Literature, Gender in Literature and Film, Ecocritical Perspectives on Contemporary Novels, and the newly launched 'Fandom and Fan Cultures.' She also teaches in the Bachelor's program in Global Studies of Culture and Society, offering 'World Literature and Global Narrative.' Dr. Persson is actively involved in the Literature Didactics Network (LDN) steering group and has co-organized conferences on human-animal relations in children's cultures, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. She collaborates extensively with Helen Asklund (MiUn) and Lena Manderstedt (LTU) on multiple research projects related to horse literature and human-animal relationships.
