Archives, Mismatches, Hacks! Overcoming Archival Boundaries in Transnational Research

Helle Strandgaard Jensen is Associate Professor of contemporary cultural history at the Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She also holds a joint directorship at the Center for Digital History Aarhus (CEDHAR). Jensen graduated from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) in 2013 with a PhD in History. Jensen’s work focuses on the contemporary history of mass media, childhood, and digitization in Scandinavia, Western Europe, and the US after 1945. She combines historical methods with theoretical approaches from cultural studies and media studies. One part of her research has media as the historical object of study. The other investigates how digital media and, in particular, digital archives and digitized sources influence the discipline of history. Jensen currently works on two projects. One is a monograph about the contested politics of children’s media funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. A second micro-funded project uses a combination of computer-assisted analysis and close readings to investigate how social media platforms shape remembrance cultures around the American children’s television program Sesame Street. She is the author of Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford University Press, 2023 ) and From Superman to Social Realism: Children’s Media and Scandinavian Childhood (John Benjamins 2017).