Sami Sjöberg

I am a researcher, translator and journalist holding a PhD in Comparative Literature. My current work as an Associate Professor in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland is interdisciplinary with a focus on experimental literature.

Before joining the University of Jyväskylä in 2023, I held various positions at the University of Helsinki, where I completed my PhD in 2012. I am currently Adjunct Professor in various Finnish universities. My research focuses on avant-garde and experimental literature, especially in relation to multimediality and interartiality, science and epistemology, and literary multilingualism. My international collaboration and longer research visits abroad include KU Leuven, Université PSL, Freie Universität Berlin and the universities of Cambridge, Copenhagen, Iceland, and Antwerp.

I am an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Avant-Garde Studies (Brill), and the author of The Jewish Vanguard: A Cultural Moment (Brill, forthcoming in 2024) and The Vanguard Messiah: Lettrism between Jewish Mysticism and the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter, 2015). I have has co-edited the volumes The Experimental Book Object: Materiality, Media, Design (Routledge, 2023) and Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde: Between Rebellion and Revelation (De Gruyter, 2017) as well as special issues for high-tier journals (incl. Angelaki). Moreover, I have published articles on the literary and cultural history of experimental writing in journals such as Orbis Litterarum, French Studies, Modernist Cultures, Image & Narrative, Partial Answers, Arcadia and Literature & Theology.

In addition to my research on surrealism and knowledge, I am the principal investigator of the interdisciplinary research group Science, Literature and Research: Avant-Garde Encounters with Biology and Ecology (2019-2022). These projects map the alternative epistemologies cultivated in the avant-gardes, which have found fertile ground only in recent critical discussions.  

I have published widely on Continental avant-garde literature and its relation to its contemporary cultural context, as well as contemporary European art and the poetics of the avant-garde. My academic articles as well as art essays and criticism have been published in English, French, Swedish and Finnish.