Dr. Erica Haugtvedt specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, media and advertising history, and popular culture. She works on the serial Victorian novel and its contemporaneous adaptations across media, focusing on characters who appear in multiple works by different creators (known as transfictional characters). Drawing upon narrative theory, media studies, and print history, Dr. Haugtvedt treats the proliferation of transfictional characters in the nineteenth century as anticipating aspects of fandom and transmedia storytelling in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her first book, Transfictional Character and Transmedia Storyworlds in the British Nineteenth Century_, came out with Palgrave in 2022.
Dr. Haugtvedt teaches a range of classes from composition to workplace writing to historical surveys of literature and humanities. Throughout her courses, she enjoys integrating themes about technology and society, focusing on the history of media (including print) up to today’s online cultures.