Academic Interests
- Popular religion and Folklore
- Cognitive culture studies, cognitive narratology
- Theory and method in the study of religions
- The cultural history of magic, witchcraft, and occultism
- Atheism and secular thought in modernity
- Literature and religion in modernity
- Contemporary pilgrimage; religion and nature
Teaching
- KULH1001 - Europas Kulturhistorie
- REL1001 - Religionsvitenskapelig teori
- KULH1003 - The Cultural History of Witchcraft and Magic
- KULH2009 - Folklore
- KULH4171 - Cognitive Cultural Studies
Ongoing research and cooperation
- Narrative Cultures of Utopian Emigration and the Formation of Modern Regimes of Attention (NC-RoA) studies nineteenth-century utopian emigrant narrative cultures. Drawing on recent models from cognitive science, especially the predictive processing framework, we analyze how narrative practices described and prescribed alternative ways of modulating attention that were foundational to modern practices of world-making. The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway (2023-2027).
- Re-Storied Sites and Routes studies how places and routes with a religious or mythical past gain renewed significance. PI for the Norwegian work package. The project is funded by the EEA Financial Mechanism Baltic Research Program in Estonia (2020-2024).
- The project "How religion became popular: The reconfiguration of religion in the modern breakthrough" analyses the interplay between fiction and religion in the process of the scientification of the concept of religion in the late 19th Century. A collaboration with the University of Basel.
Higher education and employment history
Dirk Johannsen studied History of Religions and Philosophy at the Universities of Hannover, Germany, and Varanasi, India, and received his PhD in the study of religions at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He worked as a researcher and research coordinator at the Universities of Fribourg and Basel, Switzerland, and as a lecturer at the Universities of Bern and Lucerne. Before coming to Oslo, he held a position as Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion at the University of Dublin, Trinity College.
Academic Degrees / Qualifications:
- CAS in Higher Education, University of Bern
- Dr. phil., University of Bayreuth
- Magister Artium, University of Hannover