Jenna Coughlin is Associate Professor of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. She specializes in Norwegian literature, environmental humanities, poetry and poetics, and life writing.
Jenna completed her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation focused on the relationship between language and nature in the poetry of Ivar Aasen, Olav Nygard, and Aslaug Vaa. She began learning Norwegian while working toward her B.A. in anthropology at the University of Chicago, after which she received a Fulbright student scholarship to pursue the study of both modern Norwegian and Old Norse language and literature at the University of Oslo. She has taught Norwegian language, as well as courses on the history and literature of the Arctic and nature in Nordic media and culture. She has directed an undergraduate research project on the international reception of Greta Thunberg and youth climate activism, and she recently spent ten months in Oslo as a Fulbright Scholar researching the representation of hydropower in Norwegian literature, film, and other creative media.