Helle Rytkønen

Helle Rytkønen is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

This year, she teaches "What's so funny? Humor, race, class, and gender" (PWR 2) and in the spring of 2012, she'll teach a new elective class titled "The Stanford Daily Show" where Stanford students will produce a Stanford version of Jon Stewart's Daily Show (PWR 91C).

Originally from Denmark, Helle Rytkønen came to the US 19 years ago to study at UC Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford’s Program in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2002. She also holds a MS and a BS in Political Science from University of Copenhagen. 

After her degree from Stanford, she taught graduate and undergraduate classes in cultural anthropology and rhetoric as a combined Postdoctoral Fellow at PWR and MTL at Stanford.
In 2003, she became a Teaching Fellow at Stanford’s Introduction to the Humanities Program (IHUM). She has also taught a class in politics and government at the University of San Francisco. Helle Rytkønen frequently teaches classes in cultural anthropology, communication, and cultural studies at Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. She started teaching in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric in 2006.

Her intellectual work is positioned at the intersection between feminist studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, international relations, and rhetoric. She also specializes in intercultural communication and visual rhetoric.

Her dissertation, which she completed as a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford, is a textual analysis of legal and cultural constructions of contemporary European identity in relation to Muslim immigrants and neo-nazi tendencies in Europe.

She is currently working on a book project about the changing emotional and geo-political landscapes in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall. Her most recent publication is an analysis of the infamous “cartoon” controversy caused by the Danish publication of satirical drawings of the prophet Mohammed in 2005. The analysis compares representations of Muslims in European and American media. The analysis is a chapter in Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas, by Ella Shohat and Evelyn Asultany, University of Michigan Press (2012).
A version of the article was published in the Danish Institute of International Affair's Yearbook 2007.

She has also published “Whose knowledge? How race, class, religion, and gender intersect and interfere with ‘our’ intellectual community” in Social Change in Diverse Teaching Contexts: Touchy Subjects And Routine Practices (Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education) by Nancy Barron, Nancy Grimm and Sybille Gruber [eds], Peter Lang Publishing (2006)

She has a background as a journalist and editor, and as a political assistant to a Member of the Danish Parliament.

Helle's ambition is to watch a movie a day and to learn about at least one new stand up comedian a week. She travels frequently and tries to always hold a ticket to somewhere.