Anna Rühl successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation "Selvgeografi’ – Placing the Works of Karl Ove Knausgård and Tomas Espedal" in the Department of Scandinavian Studies on 15 Dec 2015. The dissertation argues that while existing scholarship on Knausgård and Espedal's writing, and particularly on Knausgård's, asks whether their texts are indeed novels -- or whether a new terminology has to be invented to deal with them -- an overlooked thematic aspect in the works of Knausgård and Espedal is their treatment of places. Drawing on the work of humanistic geography and phenomenological philosophy, Rühl's research shows how relationships between protagonists and places function in the texts' “writing of identity” -- a project central to Knausgård and Espedal's work. Research for the dissertation was supported by the Kielland-Lovdahl fellowship. In 2016, Dr. Rühl will take a position at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany.