Martin Svensson Ekström
Senior Lecturer
Department of Languages and LiteraturesAbout Martin Svensson Ekström
Researcher, senior lecturer.
- Phone hour: by agreement
- Office hour: by agreement
Background
I submitted my dissertation in 1996, and spent the following years as a researcher at various universities in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and France. Between 1999 and 2002, I was assistant professor in Chinese at Stockholm University, and then for several years a reader in Philosophy and Aesthetics at Södertörn University. I began teaching at the University Av in 2013.
I was the editor of the (BMFEA) until 2020, and am currently a member of the advisory (or editorial) boards of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Oriens Extremus, Culture and Dialogue, and Yì: Poetry and Translation.
Research
My scholarly writings revolve around early Chinese poetry, poetics, and intellectual history but also early Greek and Roman poetics, and the early history of European sinology. My most recent publications are (SUNY Press) and (in Swedish) “Must Sinophone poetry be ‘Chinese’? On the phantasmatic logic of intercultural translation” (Swedish title: “Finns Bei Daos poesi bara i västs fantasi?), Med andra ord vol. 120.
My more recent articles have explored the intersections between early Chinese and early Greek language philosophies, and the poetics and metapoetics of the Chinese fu-genre and the ekphrastic tradition in the West (see ). I take a particular interest in the methodological issues that underlie and determine the practices of comparative literature, poetics, and philosophy.
In June 2025, I will publish Cratylus Sinensis—Reading Dong Zhongshu and Plato on ‘Correctness’ in Naming in Search of a ‘Comparative’ Methodology, a book-length 'comparative' study of early Chinese and Greek theories of language and 'naming'.
, a study of how "the metaphorical" was conceptualized and elaborated in Greece and early China, will be published in late 2025 or early 2026. I am also working on a study and translation of the Zhouyi (The Zhou Book of Changes) for Bakhåll publishing house, and an introduction and foreword to the forthcoming Swedish translation of 's The Life of Tu Fu ().
Recorded lectures
Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature Luncheon Lecture. Sept. 26. 2011. Courtesy of C-NET, Pennsylvania.
The Karlgren Seminar
Together with Fredrik Fällman and Elena Pollacchi I run the Bernhard Karlgren Seminar Series.
Teaching
Courses taught
History of Chinese Literature; Modern Chinese Literary Prose, Classical Chinese; Chinese Intellectual History (KI2103); History of Chinese Civilization (KI1210); "Modernism's Phantasm: Representations of China, Japan and 'The Orient' in Western Literature, Cinema and Philosophy" (KI2103); "Discourses" (SPL224).