Lisbeth Klastrup

This page is not updated very often. If you want to know what I am up to this very day, take a look at my blog called Klastrup's Cataclysms - it contains links to articles and sites on the net relevant to my research, and occasionally some personal observations on my life as an academic. I have been blogging since february 2001, so my blog is one of the "oldest" blogs in Denmark. I don't blog as often as I used to, but it is still alive. I seem to be spending more time on Facebook these days.

I am an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and I am involved with the research group in Innovative Communication (we blog too!) and the Center for Computer Games Research. My main research interests are communication culture online (primarily "social media" forms such as blogs and microblogs and social network sites), and persistent online (game) worlds and universes. Therefore I'm interested in current phenomena such as Facebook and microblogging, as well as the professionalisation of social media genres by politicians and cultural institutions. I also still write articles on gameworlds, aesthetics and social interaction in for instance World of Warcraft.

Have I written any books? I'm proud to report that several teachers in Denmark and Norway are still using chapters from Ida Engholm's and my Danish anthology Digitale Verdener (Digital Worlds - The Aesthecis & Design of New Media) which was published May 2004. I'm currently editing an anthology to be titled The International Handbook of Internet Research with colleagues Jeremy Hunsinger (chief editor) and Matthew Allen. It will be published by Springer Verlag, around summer 2009.

Where to find me spring 2009
I'm not teaching this term, which means that I expect to be spending some time out of Denmark, on research retreats focused on writing - my plan is to draft the manuscript for a book. Hence, I plan to spend most of May at a Norwegian research center in Greece and June at the San Cataldo retreat at which I have been granted one month's stay. For the same reason, I'm generally not available for talks, guest lectures etc, because I want to focus on my writing.