Lisbeth Klastrup

Lisbeth Klastrup (born in 1970) is a Danish scholar of digital and social media. Although her early research was on hypertext fiction, she is now best known for her research on transmedial worlds, social media, and death.

Klastrup in her early research focused on real-life virtual worlds and how they are used from a social and storytelling perspective, especially concerning online gaming and the concept of worldliness. Klastrup, particularly in a Danish context, now focuses her research on the professional and mundane uses of social media, such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, with a special interest in the mediation of serious illness and mourning in this context. In addition, she has participated in a longitudinal study of how users and politicians engage with social media during elections. She has also examined more closely the use and spreading of viral content and memes on Facebook and Reddit, in relation to elections and the COVID pandemic.

Klastrup is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and worked as an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, from 2007-2023. During this time, she was affiliated with the Innovative Communication Research Group and the Center for Computer Game Research, and later with the Department of Digital Design, and the research groups CULT (Culture and Technology). In the academic year 2006–2007, she was on leave from the IT University, working as an Associate Research Professor at the Center for Design Research Copenhagen, joining her colleague Ida Engholm. In 2020, she visited Melbourne, Australia, during a sabbatical year, and here worked with colleagues from RMIT - Digital Etnography Research Center and the Death and Technology Research Team at University of Melbourne.

In 2005, Klastrup chaired the Digital Arts and Culture conference in collaboration with Susana Tosca. In 2008, she chaired the Ninth Annual Conference for the Association of Internet Researchers, Internet Research 9.0. In 2021, she co-chaired the 5th Death Online Research Symposium.

With Engholm, Klastrup in 2004 published a Danish anthology on how to analyse digital media, such as games, hypertexts and virtual worlds; Digitale verdener. This was the first book in Danish to introduce this line of study. She co-edited The International Handbook of Internet Research, with Jeremy Hunsinger and Matthew Allen, which was published by Springer Verlag in 2010. The Second Edition of the Handbook with all new articles, was published in 2019. The work introduces several academic perspectives to the study of the internet as a social, communicative, and political phenomenon. In 2016, Klastrup published the introductory book Sociale Netværksmedier (in Danish, Samfundslitteratur), which is widely used in Danish Universities. A second edition of this book will be published in 2024. In 2019, with Susana Tosca, she published the book Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life - Networked Reception, Social Media and Fictional Worlds.

Klastrup maintained a research blog from 2001 to 2016, Klastrup's Cataclysms. As part of this blog, until 2016, she maintained a list of blogs by Danish researchers.

Selected publications