Lisbeth Klastrup

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Lisbeth Klastrup (born 1970) is a Danish scholar who studies digital culture and social media. She earned a PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen in 2003 and holds several master's degrees, including Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen (1999) and Image Studies from the University of Kent (1997).

She worked as an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen from 2007 to 2023, affiliated with groups such as Innovative Communication Research Group, Center for Computer Game Research, Department of Digital Design, and the CULT research group (Culture and Technology). She spent 2006–2007 on leave as Associate Research Professor at the Center for Design Research Copenhagen. In 2020 she took a sabbatical year in Melbourne to collaborate with RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Center and the Death and Technology Research Team at the University of Melbourne. In 2024 she became an external lecturer at Roskilde University.

Klastrup has chaired notable conferences (Digital Arts and Culture in 2005; Internet Research 9.0 in 2008) and served on the Board of Reviewers for the journal Game Studies in 2012. She co-chaired the Death Online Research Symposium in 2021. She ran a research blog, Klastrup’s Cataclysms, from 2001 to 2016 and compiled a Danish list of researchers’ blogs.

Her early research focused on real-life virtual worlds and online gaming, examining social use and storytelling. Today her work concentrates on everyday social media use in Denmark—through platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok—and how people encounter illness and mourning online. She has explored how social media is used by voters and politicians during elections and studied how memes spread on Facebook and Reddit during elections and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key publications include Digitale verdener (2004, with Ida Engholm), The International Handbook of Internet Research (2010; second edition 2019), Sociale Netværksmedier (2016; second edition 2024), and Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life (2019, with Susana Tosca).