- E-mailasbjorn.gronstad@uib.no
- Phone+47 55 58 31 64
- Visitor AddressFosswinckels gate 6Lauritz Meltzers hus5007 BergenRoom616
- Postal AddressPostboks 78025020 Bergen
Asbjørn Grønstad is professor of Visual Culture and has worked extensively on the relation between transgressive forms of visuality and ethics. He holds a PhD in American Studies (2003), and became a full professor of Visual Culture at the University of Stavanger in 2007. Between 2008 and 2013 he was Principal Investigator of Nomadikon: New Ecologies of the Image, a research project sponsored by the Trond Mohn Foundation (formerly the Bergen Research Foundation). In 2010 he launched the peer-reviewed journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture with Øyvind Vågnes. Grønstad is the recipient of two Fulbright grants (1998-99 & 2017-18) and has been a visiting professor to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2000, 2001 & 2003), the University of Amsterdam (2005, 2013), and the University of California-Berkeley (2006-07, 2011, 2013 & 2017-18). He has published 12 books and over 60 scholarly articles. His most recent monographs are Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity (Palgrave, 2020) and Ways of Seeing in the Neoliberal State. In 2022, he co-edited, with Lene Johannessen, Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield).
Most recent publications:
Ways of Seeing in the Neoliberal State
Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity
Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture
Film and the Ethical Imagination
Grønstad has contributed a range of media texts, interviews and guest lectures for the media and the public.
Latest:
Less than zero: McGurls tidsriktige reduksjonisme
Ways of Seeing og det hvite blikket
Ways of Seeing TV, episode 6 (31. oktober 2020).
Johnny Cash International - digitalt arangement (Fulbright Norway, 27. oktober 2020).
"Har vi forstått hva "Ways of Seeing" egentlig handler om?" (Aftenposten, 25. september 2020).
"Hva er problemet?" (Klassekampen, 1. september 2020).
Grønstad teaches courses and supervises projects in cinema and television studies, visual and popular culture, and American Studies. He is often involved in courses such as MEVI103: Media Aesthetics - Interpretation and Analysis, MEVI223: Media Aesthetics - History and Theory, and MEVI303: Media Aesthetics.
- (2022). Screening absence. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. 108-114.
- (2016). Gestures of Seeing. Objektiv. Tidskrift for kamerabasert kunst. 8-11.
- (2013). "Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin and the Aesthetics of Ethical Intimacy". Film Criticism. 22-37.
- (2012). Is there a transmedial dispositif? : aesthetic epistemes and the question of disciplinarity. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. 32-49.
- (2012). Ekphrasis refigured: writing seeing in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved. Mosaic. 33-48.
- (2011). "Is There a Transmedial Dispositif? Aesthetic Epistemes and the Question of Disciplinarity.". The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. 32-49.
- (2009). "Nighthawks at the Diner: Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights". American, British and Canadian Studies Journal. 106-112.
- (2008). Downcast eyes: Michael Haneke and the cinema of intrusion. Nordicom Review. 133-144.
- (2008). 'No One Goes to the Movies Anymore:' Cinema and Visual Studies in the Digital Era. Kinema. A journal for film and audiovisual media. 5-16.
- (2008). "Teljekantar og Teljefantar: Om Forsking, Formidling og den Tospråklege Fordringa". Syn og Segn. 62-77.
- (2008). "Tact and Tactility: On Jane Campion's In the Cut.". American, British and Canadian Studies Journal. 237-249.
- (2008). "Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion". Nordicom Review. 133-144.
- (2007). Disiplin og Purisme: Eit Essay om Transmedial Kultur. Norsk Medietidsskrift. 227-243.
- (2007). "Disiplin og Purisme: Eit essay om transmedial kultur". Norsk Medietidsskrift. 227-247.
- (2006). Denis Johnson's postmodern Lazarus: Transforming faith in 'Resuscitation of a Hanged Man'. American Studies in Scandinavia. 66-77.
- (2006). An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell. Image [&] Narrative.
- (2006). Abject Desire: Anatomie de l'enfer and the unwatchable. Studies in French Cinema. 161-169.
- (2005). Wonders of the Invisible World: The Handsome Family and the Topographical Uncanny. Chapter & Verse.
- (2005). Tiresijin pogled: Joyce, Rossellini iikonologija mrtvih. Ljetopis: Croatian Film Journal.
- (2005). Om Minnet, Historia, Gløymsla: Godards Eloge de l'amour. REPLIKK – Tidsskrift for samfunnsvitskap og humaniora. 34-46.
- (2005). Looking In: William Carlos Williams and the Image-Text. Estragon. 9-15.
- (2005). Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered. Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES). 121-136.
- (2005). "Straw Dogs and the Aesthetics of Violence (II)". American, British and Canadian Studies Journal. 65-79.
- (2004). Straw Dogs and the Aesthetics of Violence (1). American, British and Canadian Studies Journal. 201-217.
- (2004). Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up. The Film Journal. 10.
- (2003). One-Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body. Film Criticism. 1-23.
- (2003). Mean Streets: Death and Disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface. Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES). 385-409.
- (2003). Gathering at the River: Ford, Peckinpah and the Failure of the Communal. American Studies in Scandinavia. 51-67.
- (2002). The Gaze of Tiresias: Joyce, Rossellini and the Iconology of the Dead. Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES). 233-248.
- (2002). The Appropriational Fallacy: Grand Theories and the Neglect of Film Form. www.Film-Philosophy.com.
- (2002). Fortolkningens Hegemoni: Om Filmkritikkens Usynliggjøring av Estetikken. Z filmtidsskrift. 30-37.
- (2002). Back to Bazin?: Filmicity in the Age of the Digital Image. Popular Culture Review. 11-23.
- (2001). Violence as Form and Rhetoric: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. American, British and Canadian Studies Journal. 212-227.
- (2001). Topographies of Defeat: Masculinity and Desolation in Fat City and Junior Bonner. Kinema. A journal for film and audiovisual media. 33-48.
- (2001). Straitjacketing the Image: Illocutionary Writing and the Obstruction of Cine-Semiosis in Hawks' Scarface. Redoubt. 109-116.
- (1999). Tid, Bevegelse og Narrasjon i Film. Bordwells Neoformalisme i Lys av Deleuzes Cinesofi. REPLIKK – Tidsskrift for samfunnsvitskap og humaniora. 105-118.
- (1999). "Tid, bevegelse og narrasjon. Bordwells neoformalisme i lys av Deleuzes cinesofi". REPLIKK – Tidsskrift for samfunnsvitskap og humaniora. 105-118.
- (2024). Aesthetics, Free Speech and the Neoliberal Imaginary.
- (2024). "On Politics and Figuration".
- (2023). Sustainable Utopias.
- (2023). Plenary Lecture: "On the Persistence of Murray Bookchin’s Eco-Philosophy".
- (2023). Micro-utopias II - co-organizer.
- (2023). Convener and chair for guest lecture by Elly McCausland: "'Have They Come to Take Me Away?' Madness, Midnights, and the Feminist Antiheroism of Taylor Swift.".
- (2023). Chair of the panel "Animation and the Limits of Care".
- (2023). "Toward an Ethics of Inconvenience: Murray Bookchin's Eco-Philosophy".
- (2023). "Of Time and the River: Heather McEntire's Eno Axis".
- (2022). Rhythm in Moving Image Media.
- (2022). On the Concept of Opacity.
- (2022). Legal Aesthetics: The Case of Ways of Seeing.
- (2022). Labor, Self, and Memory in Dan Erickson's Severance.
- (2022). Komitémedlem og opponent på Jon Inge Faldalen doktoravhandling "Stillmoving.".
- (2022). Elemental Engagements: Art and/as Epistemic Media - Chair and Respondent.
- (2022). Confederalist Micro-utopias: From Murray Bookchin to Rojava.
- (2021). The River in Reverse.
- (2021). On Confinement, Sameness and Grieving: Yorgos Lanthimos's Microdystopias.
- (2021). "White Material: Michael Haneke's Ethics of Violence".
- (2021). "Refleksjoner rundt 03.08.38".
- (2020). Thoughts on running a peer-reviewed journal.
- (2020). A Conversation with Fresh Eye about Visual Culture in Europe.
- (2019). Respondent to "Political Role of New Media in Relation to American Literature and Culture" and to "The Importance of Global Digital Literacy".
- (2019). Moderator for keynote by Lisa Parks, on "Tactical Drone Use and Vertical Mediation at Standing Rock".
- (2019). Mediation, Ethics, and Opacity.
- (2019). Main organizer for the conference Monuments: The 26th Biennial Nordic Association for American Studies Conference.
- (2019). Main organizer and chair of the seminar "The Ethics of Surveillance".
- (2019). Keynote Address: "Sound and Image Between Narrative and Opacity".
- (2019). Chair, keynote by Lisa Parks: "Tactical Drone Use and Vertical Mediation at Standing Rock".
- (2019). Chair for the panel "Monuments in Popular Culture.".
- (2019). Chair for panelet "Mediating Opacity in Visual Culture".
- (2019). "Ways of Seeing in the Neoliberal State".
- (2018). Ruben Östlund and the Cinema of Vulnerability.
- (2018). Memory, Art, and Ethics in the Work of John Akomfrah.
- (2018). Cosmopolitanism and the Right to Opacity.
- (2018). A Bibliography of Machine Vision.
- (2018). 'Everything was Stories:' The Aesthetic Imaginaries of Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.
- (2018). "On Visuality and Ethics".
- (2017). Film og den Etiske Imaginasjon.
- (2017). Figuring Opacity.
- (2017). Angelopoulos, Akomfrah and "The Elsewhere of the Image.".
- (2017). "Remediation, Ethics and the Transaesthetic".
- (2017). "A New Ethics For Biovisual Screens".
- (2016). Toward an Aesthetics of Opacity.
- (2016). Ernie Gehr and the Aesthetic Imaginary.
- (2016). Cinema's Gestural Connectivities.
- (2016). "The Virtues of Opacity in a World Without Shadows".
- (2016). "Remediation, Ethics, and the Transaesthetic".
- (2015). Organizer & chair for the symposium "Contested Spaces".
- (2015). Leviathan and the Ecological Screen.
- (2015). John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses and the Ethics of Memory.
- (2015). Archival Migrations: The Organic Image in John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses.
- (2015). "The Ethics of Transgression".
- (2015). "The Aesthetic Imaginary: Eric Baudelaire's Lost Letters to Max".
- (2015). "'The Honey of the Invisible:' Experimental Documentary and the Ethics of Memory".
- (2014). "Towards an Ethics of Distortion: Post-human Visuality in Leviathan".
- (2014). "The Organic Image in Nostalgia For the Light and The Nine Muses".
- (2014). "Refigurations of Walden: Notes on Contagious Mediation".
- (2014). "Here is a Picture of no Country: The Image Between Fiction and Politics in Eric Baudelaire's Lost Letters to Max".
- (2014). "'Every Form is a Face looking at us:' The Ethical Encounter in Kiarostami's Shirin".
- (2013). The Nomadikon Lecture Series 8-11. Organizer and respondent.
- (2013). "Thinking Disciplinarity in an Age of Transmediality".
- (2013). "The Two Disciplines, Cinema Studies and Art History," Round table: Moving Images or Moving Theory? The Role of Film Studies in Creating Social Agenda for Visual Culture.
- (2013). "Temporality, Presence, and Slow Cinema".
- (2013). "Precarities Material and Conceptual".
- (2013). "Images Opaque and Precarious: On Ernie Gehr and the Boundaries of Discernibility".
- (2013). "Broken Materialities, or Three Forms of Opacity".
- (2012). Moderator for TBLRs forskerskoleseminar "On Jacques Rancière.".
- (2012). First opponent for Lise Majgaard Mortensens Ph.D thesis "Towards a Revival of Representation: Ekphrasis in the Contemporary Novel at the End of Postmodernism".
- (2012). Deltager og kommentator.
- (2012). Arrangør av The 6th Nomadikon Meeting: Ecologies of Seeing or Seeing Whole: Images and Spaces, Images within Images.
- (2012). "Taxonomies of Violence.".
- (2012). "Notes on the Power of the Precarious Aesthetic".
- (2012). "Enfolded By Cinema: The Transvisual Gaze in Tsai Ming-liang's Visage".
- (2011). Words of Welcome.
- (2011). "Writing Seeing 1: Transaesthetic Resonances".
- (2011). "Writing Seeing (1): Transaesthetic Resonances in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon and Point Omega.".
- (2011). "Words of Welcome".
- (2011). "Entropic Cinema: The Case of Antichrist/Irréversible.".
- (2011). "A Cinema of Gestures: Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum".
- (2011). "'Clear-eyed visions of the Particular:' Transaesthetic Resonances in Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon and Don DeLillo's Point Omega.".
- (2010). Presentasjon av Nomadikon for studenter på Visuell Kultur-Verksted, Københavns Universitet.
- (2010). Panel discussion on "Creativity and Mediation from Husserl to Whitehead and Back.".
- (2010). Medarrangør av "Between the Aesthetical and the Political".
- (2010). Deltagelse uten paper.
- (2010). Arrangør av konferansen The Third Nomadikon Meeting: New Screen Ecologies.
- (2010). "Words of Welcome".
- (2010). "Visuell Kultur i Norden.".
- (2010). "Toward a Transaesthetic Dispositif: Approaching Disciplinarity Through Deleuze".
- (2010). "On the Unwatchable".
- (2010). "Om forholdet mellom estetisk teori og estetisk praksis.".
- (2010). "Explaining Ourselves to the Image: Ethics and Form in Morris, Folman and Haneke.".
- (2010). "Archives of Violence".
- (2009). Kommentator, moderator, medarrangør av "Concepts, Meaning, Interpretation, Intention (med Toril Moi)".
- (2009). Arrangør av konferansen The Second Nomadikon Meeting: Images of Pain/Painful Images.
- (2009). Arrangør av The First Nomadikon Meeting: Pluralizing Visual Culture.
- (2009). Amerikabilder.
- (2009). "Words of Welcome".
- (2009). "Words of Welcome".
- (2009). "Transmedial Epistemes and the Question of Disciplinarity".
- (2009). "The Unwatchable, or, the Fork in the Eye".
- (2009). "The Ethical Life of Images".
- (2009). "The Death of Cinema and the Rise of Visual Culture Studies".
- (2009). "Roundtable Discussion: Images of Pain/Painful Images".
- (2009). "Pluralizing Visual Culture: Roundtable Discussion.".
- (2008). Moderator, kommentator, medarrangør av "Det Estetiske i Litteratur-, kunst- og kulturforskningen".
- (2008). "Theorizing Disciplinarity: The Case of Cinema Studies and its Vanishing Objects".
- (2008). "Performing Landscape in Recent Art Cinema.".
- (2008). "Nighthawks at the Diner: Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights".
- (2008). "Ekphrastic Migrations: Showing Seeing in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved".
- (2008). "Cinema and its Place in the Digital Era: The New Architecture of Image Studies".
- (2007). "The Place of Cinema in the Era of Visual Studies".
- (2007). "The Decay of Fiction and the Poetics of Pastness".
- (2006). Abject Desire:Anatomie de l’enfer and the Unwatchable.
- (2005). Wonders of the Invisible World: The Music of the Handsome Family.
- (2005). Looking In: William Carlos Williams and the Image-Text.
- (2005). Last Year at the Ambassador: Pastness in The Decay of Fiction.
- (2004). Narrative's Scar: Violence and Subjectivity in David Fincher's Fight Club.
- (2004). Denis Johnson's Postmodern Lazarus: Transforming Faith in Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
- (2004). Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up.
- (2004). "Vår Tids Redsel For Alvor:" Nokre Refleksjonar Rundt Roy Anderssons Sanger Fra Andre Etasje.
- (2003). Rossellini and the Transtextual.
- (2003). Isaac Julien's Looking For Langston and the Limits of the Visible World.
- (2003). Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered.
- (2002). The Rhetoric of the Historical Fiction Film.
- (2002). The Gaze of Tiresias: Joyce, Rossellini and the Iconology of the Dead.
- (2002). Love Among the Ruins: Memory and Iconology in Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia.
- (2002). Bazin and the Question of Filmicity in the Digital Age.
- (2001). The Lying Game?: Historical Fiction and the Re-Invention of the "Past".
- (2001). Re-Viewing Bonnie and Clyde: Context, Reception, and Aesthetic Framework.
- (2001). Re-Viewing Bonnie and Clyde: Context, Reception and Aesthetic Framework.
- (2001). Film Beyond Photography: The Politics of Artificiality.
- (2001). Andre Bazin and the Substance of Filmicity.
- (2000). The Appropriational Fallacy: Grand Theories and the Neglect of Film Form.
- (2000). Peckinpahs Walden: The Violent Indictment of Civilization in The Wild Bunch.
- (2000). "Abject Topographies: Images of Male Desolation in Fat City and Junior Bonner".
- (1999). Violence as Form and Rhetoric: On Reading The Wild Bunch as a Narrative of Regeneration.
- (2022). Microdystopias : Aesthetics and ideologies in a broken moment. Lexington Books.
- (2019). Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Palgrave Macmillan.
- (2019). Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture. Palgrave Macmillan.
- (2017). Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing. Routledge.
- (2016). Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- (2014). Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image. Bloomsbury Academic.
- (2014). Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image. Bloomsbury Academic.
- (2012). Ethics and Images of Pain. Routledge.
- (2012). Ethics and Images of Pain. Routledge.
- (2012). Ethics and Images of Pain. Routledge.
- (2010). Coverscaping : discovering album aesthetics. Museum Tusculanums Forlag.
- (2005). To Become the Self One Is: A Critical Companion to Drude Krog Janson's A Saloonkeeper's Daughter. Nova Science Publishers.
- (2024). "Sitat og Plagiat i ei Postlitterær Tid". Forskerforum.no.
- (2023). Nyliberal ytringsfridom. Klassekampen. 40-41.
- (2022). Ways of Seeing og det hvite blikket. Morgenbladet.
- (2015). Eit Globalt Perspektiv på Humaniora. På Høyden - nettavis for Universitetet i Bergen.
- (2014). "Kunst som forsking, forsking som kunst". Forskerforum. 40-41.
- (2009). Sosiopatiens anatomi - Michael Haneke og Das Weisse Band. På Høyden ( UiBs nettavis).
- (2009). "Film Heile Dagen Lang.". På Høyden ( UiBs nettavis).
- (2008). "Portrett av eit Augeblikk". Klassekampen. 12-13.
- (2008). "Eit Forsøk på å oppsummere den evigvarande tellekantdebatten". Prosa - tidsskrift for skribenter. 62-63.
- (2007). "Abu Ghraib i den visuelle kulturen". Klassekampen. 8-17.
- (2004). Murnau og Soloppgangen. Bergens Tidende. 37-37.
- (2008). New American Cinema. The Literary Encyclopedia.
- (2008). "Jean-Luc Godard". The Literary Encyclopedia.
- (2007). Mot ein ny biletvitskap: Intervju med W.J.T. Mitchell. Norsk Medietidsskrift. 71-81.
More information in national current research information system (CRIStin)
Monographs
Ways of Seeing in the Neoliberal State
Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity (utkommer desember 2020).
Film and the Ethical Imagination (2016).
Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (2012).
Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema (2008).
Anthologies
Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture (2019).
Seeing Whole: Toward and Ethics and Ecology of Sight (2016).
Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing (2016).
Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (2014).
Ethics and Images of Pain (2012).
Coverscaping: Discovering Album Aesthetics (2010).
To Become the Self One is: A Critical Companion to Drude Krog Janson's A Saloonkeeper's Daughter (2005).
Ongoing book projects:
* Aesthetics, Neoliberalism, Isegoria.
* The Poetics of Mourning: Cinema, Literature, Music
* Sleater-Kinney
* The Soundscapes Project
Nomadikon: New Ecologies of the Image (Trond Mohn Stiftelse (tidl. Bergen Forskningsstiftelse) 2008-2013).