Snapshot

Professor Lise Kildegaard is married to Luther—that is, her husband’s name is Luther, though she probably feels married to the college as well, so active is she in the departmental and college conversation.  A PhD from the University of

Chicago, Lise brings her joy in intellectual work equally to her upper-level teaching of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and to the first year common course, Paideia.  She has found a way to combine her Danish heritage with her scholarly work:  her fine translation of the celebrated Danish writer Louis Jensen’s Square Stories was adapted into a delightful campus student theater production.  And she’s doing more Jensen translations.  A lover of poems, she often tacks a fave on colleagues’ doors as a way to get our weeks off to a good start.  She bikes to work.

Teaching Philosophy

Samuel Johnson argued that the point of literature is both to "adorn a tale" and to "point a moral." I suspect that my own readings gravitate more towards the moral; indeed I feel a kind of moral urgency as I urge students to reflect critically upon the various narratives, fables, and metaphors we use when we try to explain ourselves to ourselves. But I believe as well in an ethics of pleasure, and I sometimes remind myself to allow adequate time in class to consider how these tales are adorned. I hope my students will discover that literature can both delight and instruct.

A short sample of an article on George Eliot from "Learning What Everything Costs: A Women's Studies Perspective on Middlemarch" (Reprinted in Agora, Luther College Spring 1998)

(on the love scene between Will and Dorothea, when Dorothea promises she will "learn what everything costs")

I think it's difficult to see this conversation between Dorothea and Will, or this comparison between Dorothea and Lydgate, without considering how the roles of economic producer and consumer are gendered. Middlemarch comes to us from an historical moment when the cultural definitions of "worker" and "consumer" were still emerging, and when the proliferation of consumer goods in the Victorian department stores and arcades appeared matched only by the growth of disposable income in the hands of the rising middle class. We can see in the novel that these emerging roles carried gender as well as class valences. When Dorothea promises to become a thrifty consumer, Eliot participates, and intervenes, in the overlapping and intertwined discourses of gender and economic history.

Current Research

I am currently writing on how recent scholarship in the discipline of Human Geography can help us read the politics of space in George Eliot's novels. I've been reading the work of geographers like Derek Gregory, Gillian Rose, and Doreen Massey, and finding a lot to think about.