Karin Sellberg

Dr. Karin Sellberg is a Lecturer in Humanities in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, at the University of Queensland. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts from the University of Edinburgh, complemented by a Postgraduate Diploma in Academic Practice and fellowship with the Higher Education Academy. Sellberg joined the University of Queensland as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in January 2014 and was appointed Lecturer in 2017. Prior to this, she held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and a teaching fellowship in the English Literature department. From 2012 to 2014, she served as co-director of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School, organizing international conferences such as "Bodies in Movement: Intersecting Discourses of Materiality in the Sciences and the Arts" and "Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment."

Her research focuses on medical humanities, feminist and queer historiography, contemporary fiction, and theories of gender, sexuality, disability, embodiment, and time. She investigates convergences between feminist and queer fiction and the intellectual history of science and medicine, with ongoing work on transwomen's writing, transgender history, and transitioning concepts in trans* studies, feminist philosophy, and fiction by Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. Sellberg has edited key volumes including Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (Ashgate, 2015) with Lena Wånggren and Kamillea Aghtan, and Gender: Time (Macmillan Reference USA, 2018). Notable publications include “ ‘Project Monster’: exploring projects of monstrification in bodybuilding communities” (Body & Society, 2024, with Mair Underwood), “Corporeal Creativity and Queer Gaps in Time” (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and “Newness, memory, and tradition in Karin Boye’s Moln (1922)” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). In 2018, she received a Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Teaching and Learning Award for outstanding examples of sustained excellence in teaching. Her contributions extend to co-organizing conferences like the 10th Somatechnics Conference and the CSAA Conference 2019: Cultural Transformations, influencing discussions in gender studies and cultural theory.

Professional Email: k.sellberg@uq.edu.au