Anne Kirstine Munk Christiansen

My PhD project is titled “Returning Home from War: The Figure of the Veteran in American Fiction fromthe Global War on Terror”.

The central question in my PhD project is how literary representations of the experiences of American soldiers who have been involved in the Global War on Terror portray and challenge ideas about the meaning of home, citizenship, and national belonging. How do these fictions portray home as a physical place, as a mental or psychological place, and as a place of familiar relations? What does home mean in these stories, and how is the description of home related to war, war experiences, and the figure of the veteran? 

The three main works I’m studying in my thesis are: George Saunders’s short story ”Home” (2011), Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Karthage (2014), and Roy Scranton’s novel War Porn (2016). In these works, the narratives are built around returning veteran’s homecoming and reintegration in society, something that make them especially well-suited for studying the ideas of home and belonging.