Research profile

Kim Toft Hansen researches Danish and Nordic television and film within an international context. He maintains a prolific interest in media production with special interests in the production of Danish television series. He is an expert in the field of Nordic Noir and the Scandinavian variations of the crime genre. These fields of research bridge a relationship between cultural policies and business policies as well as a notable interest in the production of place through mediated representations.

His production research has introduced location studies as a new method within media production research, branching off into tourism studies and ethnographic and political interests into place and space. His profound interest in place-making also embraces special attention towards peripheral media production and municipal utilization of especially local television production for an international audience. The centre-periphery relationship between urban and rural settings feeds directly into his expertise in the crime genre.

His recent ventures has taken the above-mentioned perspectives into the Nordic streaming wars in online television and SVoD distribution. These perspectives tie together the practical interest in local and international television production with new viewing patterns and global conglomerates’ interest in local production, including special policy interests in relation to the relationships between local, national, regional and international media policies and funding practices, e.g. the AVMSD and the Creative Europe programme.

He has a profound interest in media history and the relationships between history and media. His 2015 book 1864: tv-serien, historien, kritikken (1864: TV series, History, Criticism) sparked media debates about the uses of history in popular cultural media production. His recent contribution to the volume Medietemaer (Media Themes) on "History" emphasizes a number of dominant functions in the relations between media, communication and history.

He has partaken in a range of profiled research projects, including recently What makes Danish TV drama series travel? (DFF 2014-18) and DETECt – Detecting Trancultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (H2020 2018-21). In the last-mentioned, he led a work package on Creative Industries, conducting production research into literature, film and television. This has also involved the maintenance of a charitable stakeholder network with close collaboration with TV 2 Denmark and Miso Film, a few among a range of stakeholder contacts with great importance for his work.

He is currently part of the EU-project GEMINI (Gender Equality through Media Investigation and New training Insights) (EU-CERV 2023-25). In this project, he researches young adults' perception of contemporary serial drama in order to produce new teaching methods for teaching gender equality in European high schools.

The through-line of his research revolves around local and international media production, streaming services, municipal business model through media production exposure, settings and locations in television and film, media peripherality, media literacy, history and media, and the increasingly close relationship between business and cultural policies. When he finds the courage, he likes to play around with media production himself, and a new-found joy has been fiddling with video essays.

He teaches media and cultural studies and media history at different departments at Aalborg University, most importantly at the programme for Scandinavian studies. He teaches and supervises all levels, including PhD research into local media production and creative industries. He maintains the role as an employability supervisor for the students’ career board at The Institute of Culture and Learning. In this way, he connects his research field and teaching responsibilities to his interests within creative industries.