In 2017, I was the first to be appointed associate professor of contemporary archaeology at a Danish university, and since then, I have worked to widen the awareness and impact of this field of archaeology in teaching, research, and broader dissemination. In particular, I focus on the presence of traces of the recent past in everyday life, but also how objects and places disappear. This builds on my earlier work on absence, loss, memory, and commemoration, in combination with my background as a landscape archaeologist. Most recently, I have engaged in creative and experimental archaeological endeavours of an ‘art/archaeological’ nature (as coined by Doug Bailey), expanding the encounter with traces from the retrospective, explanatory and interpretative framework towards an investigation of the future-oriented potentials of traces (inspired by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur).

Research activities in relation to conferences and seminars attest to my collaboration and network with national and international scholars. Also, my past employments have largely involved international collaboration: my PhD was funded by an internationalisation stipend; my Marie Curie postdoc at the University of Cambridge was part of a project with the collaboration of seven universities in five European countries; my employment as assistant professor in Aarhus was part of a collaboration between Danish and Norwegian institutions; the initiative I am currently leading (The Hub for Speculative Fabulations upon Incidental Observations) includes participants from five different countries. 

While firmly grounded in archaeological epistemology, I have cultivated interdisciplinary collaboration throughout my career, working with scholars from different fields of research (anthropology, art history, media studies, human geography), expanding even further in the conferences I have organised. I also cultivate my interdisciplinary and international network in publication projects (many of my publications are co-authored with scholars from institutions and disciplines outside my own). Having been invited as a speaker in several non-archaeological fora, acting as peer reviewer for non-archaeological journals a dozen times, and being cited in numerous non-archaeological journals and books, are also indicative of my capacity for making archaeology relevant to other disciplines in the humanities. Finally, as documented in several of my publications, I have been a vocal critic of the current science turn in archaeology and have contributed to debating how the sciences affects the epistemological ground of the humanities.