Asbjørn Grønstad is founding director of Nomadikon: The Bergen Center of Visual Culture. He is professor of Visual Culture in the Department of information science and media studies, University of Bergen. Among his recent books are Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson, Bloomsbury 2014), Ethics and Images of Pain (co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson, Routledge 2012), and Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (Palgrave, 2011). He has authored numerous articles across a range of disciplines such as cinema studies, American Studies, visual culture and gender studies, and his research interests range from visual studies, film theory, intermediality and ekphrasis to narrative theory, American literature, popular culture, and the history and theory of disciplinarity. Grønstad is also one of two founding editors of the peer-reviewed journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture, whose first issue appeared in 2010, and he is on the editoeial or advisory board of several journals, including Photomediations Machine, ABC, and Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. Some of his current projects are Seeing Whole, an interdisciplinary anthology co-edited with Mark Ledbetter and due out in 2015 on Cambridge Scholars Publishing; Film and the Ethical Imagination, a monograph to be completed in 2015/2016; and Obstructed Vision, a volume tied to the ongoing Copenhagen-based research project The Power of the Precarious Aesthetic. He is also affiliated with the international, multidisciplinary research group Text, Axtion, Space, whose new project Exploring Texts, Media and Memory launches in the fall of 2014. He is involved in several academic networks, one of which is Visual Culture in Europe, and has been a member of European Network of Cinema and Media Studies since its inception in 2006.
Grønstad was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998-1999, where he returned as an honorary research fellow in 2000, 2001 and 2003. In 2005 and again in 2013 he was a visiting scholar at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). He has had three appointments as visiting professor at the University of California-Berkeley (2006-07, 2011, and 2013). Between 2009 and 2014 he has hosted or co-hosted seven Nomadikon conferences.
Grønstad earned his doctorate from the University of Bergen in 2003, where he also was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies between 2004 and 2007. In 2007, he was appointed professor of visual culture at the University of Stavanger, the first in this field in Norway. Email: asbjorn.gronstad@uib.no