Fredrik Renard is a literary scholar specializing in European literature from the 18th to the 20th century. After receiving his PhD from Stockholm University and Justus Liebig University (Giessen) in 2020, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stockholm University and the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where he conducted a project funded by the Swedish Research Council. In 2025, he took up his position as Assistant Professor at Uppsala University.

Renard’s research addresses questions in poetics, genre theory, historical narratology and phenomenology, with a particular emphasis on the novel. His doctoral dissertation examined how the German novel became modern through its treatment of chance and contingency. It was awarded a prize by the Swedish Academy and later published as a monograph by J. B. Metzler. His subsequent work has investigated how literature interrogates the physical, perceptual and experiential dimensions of reality on a formal and conceptual level. This has resulted in publications in Critical Inquiry, Poetics Today, and Modernism/modernity. This line of inquiry has led to his current interest in how literature engages with the fundamental forces of nature through its representation of movement and weight.

As a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, Renard will pursue the project Falling Matters: On Weight and Gravity in Literature. The project explores the role that weight and gravity play in literary texts, asking how fiction responds to the fact that bodies and objects fall toward the ground in the absence of support. It also considers the creative potential that gravity offers for literature, and how this potential has varied historically.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.