Mediated Affects across Artistic Media (IMS Affect)
IMS Affect is a multidisciplinary research cluster interested in how affect is mediated. The cluster investigates the ways in which media affordances give rise to affective effects in and across a range of artistic media.
Image: Children reacting to a Puppet Show in François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (1959).
Affect is a crucial component in how the world is experienced and an increasingly prominent characteristic of our interconnected age. Public discourses frequently draw on the affective register to various ends, shared affective attunements form the social glue of many communities, and art continues to move us in a multitude of ways.
IMS Affect researches how affect is shaped by the material conditions of a range of media and how affect becomes meaningful in interactions between media, bodies and the environment. With an emphasis on aesthetic analysis, IMS Affect offers tools for unpacking how affect and the senses connect in engaging with media. It brings an intermedial intervention to the study of affect by exploring how media characteristics and media relations work in tandem to produce affective effects.
A hub for scholars from several disciplines in the Arts and Humanities, IMS Affect investigates topics such as the mediation of nostalgia, subjectivity in interacting with media, the depiction of illness through affect in comics, affect in music, moods in video games, and mediated authenticity in performance poetry. Alongside on-going research projects, IMS Affect develops educational materials and collaborates with a number of local and international partners.
IMS Affect is part of Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS).
For more information about our activities, please register for the IMS newsletter on the IMS website or contact us directly.
Call for Papers
Special Issue “Affect and Intermediality” in the journal Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture (ISSN: 2083-2931)
Editors: Anne Holm (Associate Professor of English, Linnaeus University) and Niklas Salmose (Professor of English, Linnaeus University). Co-Editors: Anna Ishchenko (PhD student in MIDWorld, Linnaeus) and Beatriz Carlsson-Pecharromán (PhD student in Global Humanities, Linnaeus)
We invite submissions for a special issue dedicated to exploring the dynamic intersections between affect and intermediality. This collection of articles seeks to illuminate how emotional experience is shaped, transmitted, and transformed across different media environments.
The special issue welcomes contributions that investigate how affect is conditioned by the material, aesthetic, and relational properties of media. We are especially interested in scholarship that:
- examines how emotional responses arise from specific media affordances,
- analyzes how interactions between bodies, technologies, and environments produce meaningful affective experiences,
- investigates how intermedial relations—between forms, genres, and modalities—shape or shift affective engagement,
- considers how artistic and cultural practices mobilize affect across different media contexts.
Scholars at all career stages are encouraged to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief biography of 200 words to niklas.salmose@lnu.se before August 15, 2026. Full submissions for those abstracts that are accepted are expected on April 1, 2027.
Call for Papers (PDF)
Our researchers
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Martin Knust Professor of musicology
- +46 470-70 86 37
- martinknustlnuse
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Jørgen Bruhn Professor
- +46 470-70 86 11
- jorgenbruhnlnuse
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Nina Ernst Senior lecturer
- +46 470-76 72 53
- ninaernstlnuse
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Per Israelson Senior lecturer
- perisraelsonlnuse
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Anna Ishchenko Doctoral student
- +46 470-70 87 33
- annaishchenkolnuse
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Liviu Lutas Professor
- +46 470-76 78 59
- liviulutaslnuse
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Per Bäckström Affiliate professor of comparative literature
- perbackstromlnuse
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Yagmur Atlar Doctoral student
- yagmuratlarlnuse