Jón Karl Helgason is a professor in Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland, teaching in the Departments of Icelandic and Icelandic as a Second Language.

His primary research areas are the reception of the Icelandic sagas, Icelandic 20th-century cultural history, cultural saints of Europe and metaficton.

Jón Karl has published numerous books and articles in Icelandic, but also the following works in English:

• Echoes of Valhalla. The Afterlife of Eddas and Sagas. London: Reaktion Books, 2017.
• National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2016 (co-authored with Marijan Dović).
• The Rewriting of Njáls Saga. Translation, Ideology and Icelandic Sagas. Topics in Translation 16. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999, vi + 175 pp.

Jón Karl co-edited the Icelandic cultural journal Skírnir with Róbert Haraldsson from 1995-1999 and is also the editor of a number of other Icelandic publications. He has co-edited the following books in English.

• Egil, the Viking Poet. Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015 (co-edited with Laurence de Looze, Russell Poole, and Torfi H. Tulinius).
• Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood. National Cultivation of Culture 18. Leiden: Brill, 2019 (co-edited with Marijan Dović).
• From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and Historical Imagination. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020 (co-edited with Tim William Machan).

A list of his scholarly articles in English is available on a separate page.