Nicolai Skiveren, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies (NZCHAS) at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. In 2023, he earned his PhD in Art, Literature, and Cultural Studies from the Graduate School of Arts at Aarhus University, Denmark. Dr. Skiveren has also worked at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and the Department of English at Aarhus University as a lecturer in media studies and media culture, environmental aesthetics and ecomedia, cultural studies, and fictionality theory.

Dr. Skiveren’s research is situated at the intersection of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and audience reception studies. His research interests focus on the representation of environmental issues in popular culture and its reception, including literature, film, television, and other media types. His dissertation, entitled Cinematic Waesthetics: An Investigation of the Aesthetics of Waste in Contemporary Film and Television, charts the representation of waste in contemporary film and television and has been described as an “outstanding original contribution to the fields of film, media studies, and critical waste studies”.

His work has appeared in journals such as Environmental Humanities, Ekphrasis, and Revenant – as well as in the recent volume Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change (2023) published by the University of Minnesota Press. Dr. Skiveren also writes news articles for www.empiricalecocriticism.com and he has published popular science articles about environmental issues for various news outlets in Denmark.

He is currently PI on a research project about empirical ecocriticism funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (“Bridging the Gap: Qualitative Empirical Ecocriticism and the Impact of Environmental Narrative”). In this project, he explores qualitative approaches to study of environmental narratives, focusing especially on documentary films about animal agriculture.