Latest publications
Guest editor, special section on kairos in Philosophy & Rhetoric 56: 3-4. "Guest Editor's Introduction: A Moment for Kairos" . Project MUSE - Philosophy & Rhetoric-Volume 56, Numbers 3-4, 2023 (jhu.edu)
"Rereading Crashaw's Emblem 'To the Countess of Denbigh (1652)'," SEL -Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 63:1 (Winter 2025): 53-81.
Invited paper
"Quintilian and the New Sciences", Symposium on the History of Rhetoric: a Tribute to Marc van der Poel (1957-2022), Radboud University Nijmegen, 10 January 2025
Teaching
ENG4440 – Virtual Realities in English – Universitetet i Oslo (uio.no)
ENG4366 – Fiction and Film – University of Oslo (uio.no)
ENG2326 – Fiction and Film – Universitetet i Oslo (uio.no)
ENG4429 – Life Writing in English - University of Oslo (uio.no)
ENG4344 – The Romantic Period - University of Oslo (uio.no)
ENG2304 – The Romantic Period - University of Oslo (uio.no)
ENG4341 – English Renaissance Literature - University of Oslo (uio.no)
ENG2301 – English Renaissance Literature - University of Oslo (uio.no)
ENG1303 – British Literature - University of Oslo (uio.no)
Research profile
Tina Skouen (Dr. art.) is Professor of English-language literature and former co-director (with Bruce Barnhart) of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. Her primary area of research is early modern literature, but she also works with contemporary materials. The article "Brian Cox and the New Enlightenment," for example, interrogates the role of Britain's best known physicist as Professor for Public Engagement in Science. The MA course titled Virtual Realities investigates how fiction writers contribute to debates about artificial intelligence/AI.
Her most recent publications have centered on the concept of Kairos, the opportune moment, and this was also the topic of a special section that she guest edited for Philosophy & Rhetoric (Penn State UP) in 2023-24.
Skouen tends to study literature from earlier historical periods in a rhetorical and philosophical perspective, exploring concepts and images while also paying attention to the social and material contexts in which the texts originally appeared. Specializing in rhetorical studies, she has published articles on John Donne's "rhetoric of passion," Richard Crashaw's "opportune emblem", John Dryden's "vocal wit," Margaret Cavendish's "stigma of haste," and Joseph Conrad's "Ciceronian myth." Her essays have been selected for special mention in Year’s Work in English Studies (Oxford UP) and cited in e.g. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics (4th ed.), The Oxford English Literary History, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry, and The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship. Her reading of Thomas Sprat's controversial History of the Royal Society (1667) has been cited e.g. in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the History of Science, The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, and The Oxford English Literary History, Vol V. Her co-edited collection (with Ryan Stark) on Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society (Brill 2014) was the first book to present in one volume the key articles discussing the Royal Society’s pioneering role in shaping modern science communication.
Skouen's monograph on The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature investigates writers’ sense of time and haste in the period from c. 1580 to 1720, combining perspectives from rhetoric, book history and emblem studies. The topic of Time has been a favorite theme since she completed her doctoral degree at UiO in 2007 and took up a research fellowship with the American-Scandinavian Foundation to study "Time and Aesthetic Value." The project won a Research Award from ISHR-International Society for the History of Rhetoric and also received funding from the Nansen Foundation and UNIFOR, before landing a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Norwegian Research Council. She has spent three periods as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Skouen serves on the editorial boards of Rhetorica - A Journal of the History of Rhetoric (Johns Hopkins UP) and Journal for the History of Rhetoric (Penn State UP). She has served on committees such as the ISHR-International Society for the History of Rhetoric's Grants Committee (2022-26), the ISHR Publication Committee, and the Program Committee for the 23rd ISHR Conference. In 2017, she was appointed by RSA-Renaissance Society of America to serve on the William Nelson Prize Committee evaluating essays published in Renaissance Quarterly (University of Chicago Press). From 2017-2020 she was part of the Leadership Group in her department, while also serving as Director of the doctoral program. During this period, she was responsible for organizing PhD seminars and teaching the Thesis Seminar in literature for PhD candidates across the Faculty of of Humanities.
Before taking up her current position at UiO, Tina taught at Telemark University College, Bø, and the Norwegian Military Academy (Krigsskolen). In the period between her MA and PhD she worked very many years outside the academe as a journalist and in the fitness industry. She now teaches weekly Pilates/Reformer classes at The Room.
