Visiting Professor Lee Palmer Wandel describes her experiences at PRIVACY

In 2020 we had the great pleasure of a three-month visit of Prof. Lee Palmer Wandel.

She describes her research stay with us in the following way:  

At the beginning of my semester at the Centre, I was asked to speak about my professional trajectory.  By the time I left, the Centre had become a part of that trajectory.  I found there a vibrant community of scholars, who came from different disciplines and who have entered into conversation with one another in ways that enabled us all to grow as scholars.  My own work was transformed.  The two chapters I had drafted before arriving are more theoretically articulate, as well as more informed.  The chapter that I drafted while at the Centre reconceptualizes churches in terms I could not have imagined before I arrived. 

Mette Birkedal Bruun has conceived, enacted, and fostered a research community unique in my experience.  The Centre is home to scholars of legal history, intellectual history, gender, architecture and architectural history, theology, and church history.  They learn from one another, and their work has become richly interdisciplinary as they have learned new ways of posing questions and conceiving of the nexus of person, law, and space that grounds the study of privacy, the focus of the Centre.  The Centre is not driven by a single research question, but allows the elusiveness of "privacy" to engender extraordinarily rich research of enormous promise. 

I found a home at the Centre and formed conversations that, I hope, will be lifelong.  It is a magical place, where learning is asked questions that open it to new directions.