Staff
Centre Director
Director of PRIVACY, Professor of Church History, University of Copenhagen, DK.
My research focuses on religious dimensions of the dynamic between withdrawal from the world and engagement with the world. I have worked extensively on medieval and Early Modern monasticism as well as on the interaction between monastic and lay devotion in Early Modern France.
E-mail: mbb@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.21
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Centre Administration
Maj Riis PoulsenHead of Administration. Maj works in close collaboration with the Centre Director to ensure efficient planning and execution of the center's strategic projects. Maj’s work includes communication with relevant stakeholders, funding organizations, and public bodies. She is responsible for maintaining an overview of all activities at the centre, for example finances, recruitments, visitors, collaborations, applications and research reports. E-mail: mrp@teol.ku.dk Room 5C.0.26 |
Emma Klakk ChristensenAcademic officer and assistant editor Emma is assistant editor of the centre’s research journal Privacy Studies Journal. In this role, she secures a meaningful and professional workflow of the review and publication process. This task involves communicating and collaborating with authors, reviewers, the editorial board, copy editors etc. Furthermore, she assists the administrative team at the centre with communication tasks. In addition, she is the editor of the research project STAY HOME: The Home during the Corona Crisis – and after at Centre for Privacy Studies. Emma communicates results, activities, and insights from the research group and plans events such as conferences, seminars, and workshops. E-mail: emma.klakk@teol.ku.dk Room: 5C.0.09 |
Beate Skakkebæk Lindegaard
Student assistant
Beate assists with administrative work such as the centre's website, as well as practical tasks regarding the planning and execution of events at the centre. E-mail: beatel@teol.ku.dk Room 5C.0.26 |
Lucas Rigillo
Student assistant Lucas assists with administrative work such as the centre's website, as well as practical tasks regarding the planning and execution of events at the centre. E-mail: dfj514@teol.ku.dk Room 5C.0.26 |
Core Scholars
Annabel BrettProfessor in History of Political Thought, University of Cambridge, UK.
I am a specialist in the history of political thought from the late middle ages to the mid-seventeenth century. My research includes the scholastic, humanist and Protestant natural law traditions, political Aristotelianism, and Early Modern understandings of international law.
E-mail: asb21@cam.ac.uk
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Philippe Cocatre-ZilgienProfessor of Legal History, Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas, FR.
My research focuses on Roman Law.
E-mail: pccz@wanadoo.fr
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Maarten DelbekeProfessor of History and Theory of Architecture, ETH, Zurich, CH.
My research focuses on the history of architectural theory from the Early Modern period up to the present. I am particularly interested in how architecture is conceived as a medium, and how this conception informs the legitimation of architecture as a cultural practice.
E-mail: maarten.delbeke@gta.arch.ethz.ch
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Peter Thule Kristensen
Professor of Spatial Design, Department of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation (KADK), Copenhagen, DK. E-mail: pthul@kadk.dk
Room: 5C.0.07
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Karen LauterbachAssociate Professor, Director at Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen PhD. (2009), MA. (2000) in International Development Studies, Roskilde University My research focuses on lived religion, perceptions of wealth and power and urban history in Africa – primarily Uganda and Ghana. In my recent publications, I have examined Christianity, trust, sites of wealth and power and urban spaces in Ghana, as a way to understand the relationship between history, the everydayness of religion and urban infrastructures. Furthermore, I teach core courses on Religion, Culture and Society in Africa, thematic courses on Religion, Popular Culture and the Media and supervise master theses on the African Studies programme at UCPH. I look forward to focusing on questions related to social, spatial and religious dynamics between individuals and communities with the notion of privacy as an analytical category and to explore ways in which African cases, contexts and knowledges nuance the historic notions of privacy that the Centre has focused on so far. E-mail: kjl@teol.ku.dk |
Scientific Staff
Paolo AstorriAssistant Professor MLaw, University of Macerata. JCL, Pontifical Lateran University. PhD in Law, KU Leuven. My research focuses on the boundaries between public and private built by Early Modern German theologians and jurists. It aims to study and compare ‘privacy regulation’ in the court of conscience and in the secular courts. My sources are manuals of moral theology, collections of cases of conscience, legal treatises and case reports. E-mail: paolo.astorri@teol.ku.dk |
Francis Ethelbert Kwabena BenyahAssistant Professor in African Studies at the Centre of African Studies and Centre for Privacy Studies. My scholarly pursuits primarily revolve around Religion and Culture in West Africa, with a specific focus on exploring the intricate and multifaceted relationship between Religion and Culture in the region. In addition, I also engage in research pertaining to Privacy Studies. Specifically, I have a profound interest in examining the dynamic interplay between religion, culture, memory, and privacy at former slave castles and forts in Ghana. Furthermore, my research extends to the investigation of privacy and health concerns in both Christian and indigenous forms of healing in West Africa. |
Hannah Katharina HjorthPhD Fellow MA (2023) in History, University of Copenhagen In this PhD project I investigate how slavery intersected with privacy among free people of color in the Caribbean from 1750-1850. By focusing on free families of color in the free ports on Curaçao, St. Barthélemy and St. Thomas, my aim is to answer the question of how a structural, societal practice like slavery impacted, changed, and challenged family relations among free people of color. I am interested in investigating the friction slavery caused in intimate relations and how this shaped privacy in the colonial Caribbean. E-mail: hkh@teol.ku.dk Room: 5C.0.19 |
Søren Frank Jensen
Postdoctoral Researcher
PhD, Cand.theol., UCPH
My research revolves around notions of privacy in early modern biblical interpretation. My PhD project centres on Nikolaus Selnecker’s (1530-92) commentaries on the Book of Psalms and explores ideals of the Christian life for secular authorities and their subjects, prescribed public and private devotion, and Biblical interpretation as a mode of spiritual direction. I also study funeral sermons, postils and catechisms.
E-mail: sfj@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.19
Natacha Klein KäferAssistant Professor BA in History at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria; MA in Religious Studies Universität Erfurt; PhD in Early Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin/University of Kent My research focuses on popular knowledge and attempts to control it in the Early Modern period. I will look into how popular healing knowledge survived in the private sphere despite the efforts to suppress these practices, paying particular attention to the relationship between popular healing and “official” medical knowledge, witch trials, and the legal framing of healing practices. E-mail: nkk@teol.ku.dk |
Natalie Patricia KörnerAssistant Professor Architecture history and theory - with a focus on interiors, (digital) archives and spatial imaginaries - form the core of my research. I also teach at the Master’s program Spatial Design at the Institute of Architecture and Design (KADK), which engages with history, anthropology, tectonics and materiality as research and design tools. E-mail: npk@teol.ku.dk |
Johannes LjungbergAssistant Professor PhD in History, Sweden’s National Graduate School of History, Lund University 2017; Assistant Professor, Linnæus University 2018–2020; Editor-in-chief, 1700-tal: Nordic Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2020– My research at PRIVACY focuses on urban community and co-existence in the centre’s case studies on late seventeenth-century Helmstedt and eighteenth century Altona. More precisely, I investigate conflicts involving notions of privacy in relation to protection of private conversations, public regulation of urban spaces and social relations, and intrusions in private and semi-public rooms and houses. I am also focusing on how the results of the research program relate to grand theories regarding the public and the private as well as different processes of privatisation and state intervention along the early modern period. E-mail: jbl@teol.ku.dk |
Thomas LyngbyVisiting scholar, Ph.D., senior researcher. MA in History and Danish from the University of Copenhagen. Ph.D. in History from Aarhus University (translated title of thesis: Ways of Habitation. Arrangement, Life, Atmosphere end Mental Life in Urban Houses of the Upper Classes 1570-1870) I am working on a book about the manor house Ledreborg, which reflects the most exquisite Danish building, interior and garden art of the mid-18th century. The book will cover how the manor was used in everyday life and on festive occasions, including how public and private spheres could be mixed and separated. I have also researched in Dano-Norwegian absolutism and its ceremonies, national identity and many other topics related to Danish and European cultural history c. 1500-1900. E-mail: tly@teol.ku.dk Room: 5C.0.9 |
Alexander M. K. MkandawirePhD Fellow MA (2024) in Theology, University of Copenhagen My PhD project explores the ways in which notions of belief and privacy were exchanged in early-modern missionary encounters. Focusing on Greenland, I engage with detailed studies of diaries, letter correspondences, different types of devotional texts, such as psalms and hymns as well as the writing and “re”-writing of tales from the Greenlandic oral story telling tradition. My aim is to open new perspectives on the cultural/ colonial encounter between the Greenlandic Inuit and missionaries representing both the Danish mission as well as the mission of the Unitas Fratrum. E-mail: amkm@teol.ku.dk Room: 5C.0.19 |
Lars Cyril NørgaardAssociate Professor
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Barbara TextorPhD candidate at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. My research addresses gender relations, through criminal proceedings, referring to sexual violence. These crimes belong to Title VIII, “Of crimes against the security of the honor and honesty of families and public outrage at modesty” of the 1890 Brazilian Penal Code. I am using one hundred fifty criminal proceedings, selected according to spatial, chronological, and criminal criteria, focusing on the city of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. This study aims to analyze social and cultural practices, as well as moral values within this context, considering the actions and narratives that permeate the “strategies” of victims and defendants regarding the crimes in question. My exchange project at the Centre for Privacy Studies is entitled “Sexual Crimes, Honor, Violence and Privacy in Southern Brazil (1890-1942): New theoretical and methodological approaches”, aiming to integrate privacy studies methodologies into the study of issues of sexual violence, honor and reputation. |
Bastian VaucansonCand.theol., PhD in church history and French literature. My research focuses on the performativity of spiritual intimacy in Western Europe, New France, and the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Through private correspondences, (auto)biographies, missionary accounts, and spiritual treatises, I investigate how individuals and groups used theological and rhetorical ideals to ascribe emotional meaning to traumatic experiences such as loss, sacrifice, and subjugation. I am currently a Carlsberg Foundation Postdoc at the Sorbonne Nouvelle with an affiliation to the Centre for Privacy Studies |
Viktor WreströmPhD Fellow MA (2023) in History, University of Lund My PhD project focuses on how urban gardens and parks functioned as a middling area between public elements and private activities within the urban landscape. It is pursued à la longue durée from antiquity to the early modern period, focusing on both continuities and on changing functions and accessibility. I have previously worked on retirement, political withdrawals and comebacks in the Roman Republic, on the Horti Luculliani (Gardens of Lucullus), as well as on body politics and bathing culture in classical antiquity. E-mail: vwr@teol.ku.dk Room: 5C.0.19 |
Hui-Yi YangPhD fellow My PhD project focuses on architectural history and light in architecture. My research is a comparative case study of sleeping and death rituals within the bed(room) at home. I aim to investigate the spatial environment for sleeping and death, and to examine how the light/darkness phenomena is shaped and its relation to privacy. The cases include the bed within the Siraya Ethnicity's House in Formosa (now Taiwan) during Dutch colonization (1624 to 1662) and the bed box of Rembrandt’s House during the residency of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia (1639-1642).
Room: 5C.0.19 |
Affiliated Scholars
Martin AlmbjärPostdoctoral Researcher My academic interests range from diplomatic history in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century to the development of the informal and formal credit markets in Sweden and Finland the early twentieth century. I have a penchant for mixing social, economic, political and administrative history in my research as I think that particular mix yields the most interesting results. The proportions vary from project to project. I defended my thesis in 2016. It's topic is petitions submitted to the Age of Liberty Riksdag and their role in furthering political inclusion to groups that weren't represented in the Riksdag. I also investigate the role norms and administrative limitations played in shaping the interaction between the Riksdag and the petitioners, using March and Olsen's institutional theories on the Logic of Appropriateness. You can find the thesis here. I am currently writing a book on Swedish diplomatic practices in eighteenth century Spain with a focus on the Swedish consuls in the port towns of Cadiz, Malaga, Alicante, Barcelona and in the port towns of Galicia. I am interested in the consular practices and how consuls executed their office in combination with the private business enterprises. The relationship between the consuls' public duties and their private affairs are yet to be studied in a Swedish context. E-mail: mar@teol.ku.dk |
Rebecca ArnheimPostdoctoral researcher My research focuses on the History of Art from the Italian early modern period. I am particularly interested in collecting practices and the agency of spaces during the sixteenth century. My current project stems from my doctoral dissertation. It examines the creation, exchange, collection, and display of portrait drawings in Italy from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century. The intimate nature of the portrait drawing requires a more private display and reception, a facade I explore in my work. |
Sara AyresVisiting Fellow Sara Ayres obtained her doctorate from Birkbeck College, London, in 2012 with a thesis on the way in which Gustav Klimt's paintings were hung in women collectors' private domestic spaces, and then photographed and published within architectural journals (Oxford Art Journal, 2014). Between 2016 and 2018 she was the Queen Margarethe II Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Portrait Gallery in London, working on cultural transfer within the portraits of Danish-British consorts. In 2019 she was awarded a travel grant from the Paul Mellon Centre to study the reception of William Hogarth's prints in Denmark, specifically their display in print rooms inhabited by Caroline Mathilde af Storbritannien and Kristian VII at Hirschholm and Christiansborg Palaces. At the Centre for Privacy Studies she will be working on the Luxdorph Samling collection of pamphlets in the Royal Danish Library. She has edited collections on sculptural transfer between Norden and Europe (Sculpture and the Nordic Region, Ashgate, 2017) and on Danish-British consorts (The Court Historian, 2019). Her article on Anna of Denmark's British portraiture is forthcoming this year in the Journal for the Historians of Netherlandish Art. E-mail: saa@teol.ku.dk |
Jelena BakicHer main research interests lie in the field of Italian Renaissance, marginal writings, history of emotions, querelle des femmes, and privacy studies. She gained a joint PhD degree in early modern European literature and cultural history from the University of Porto, Portugal and Charles University of Prague, Czech Republic, completed within the TEEME programme (Text and Event in Early Modern Europe). At the moment, she is a virtual research fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions School of Humanities - the University of Western Australia. Under supervision of dr. Diana Barnes, she works on dedicatory epistles and history emotions in Renaissance, arguing for the importance of analysis of female and male authored dedicatory epistles in the context of history of emotions. Recently, she obtained one month visiting professorship at the University of Bologna, where she works under supervision of Prof. Patrizia Caraffi, on querelle des femmes and history of emotions. Apart from this, she is an integrated researcher within the CITCEM – the transdisciplinary research centre “Culture, Space and Memory”, at the University of Porto, and a member of the project “Men for Women. Voces Masculinas en la Querella de las Mujeres” at the University of Sevilla. |
Liam BenisonBA (Honours) in English and MA in Early Medieval English Literature, University of Melbourne; PhD in Early Modern Literature, University of Kent and the University of Porto. Postdoctoral researcher, Centre for English Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (CETAPS), University of Porto. My research investigates the meaning of early modern privacy through utopian literature. I am interested in how ideals of abolishing private property and achieving social harmony through surveillance conflict with ideal values of selfhood in utopian texts. I examine the texts' links to the intellectual discourse on privacy and related concepts of dissimulation, deceit, secrets, and silence. I also study the architectures and spatiality of the private and public in utopian visions, the emotions associated with the protection of personal knowledge, and the construction of knowledge about people and places as the discovery of secrets. |
Ivana BicakPostdoctoral Researcher Ivana Bicak works on the literary reception of anatomical and medical experiments in early modern Europe. She is officially based at the University of Exeter, where she is currently pursuing a Wellcome-funded research project on satires of experimental medicine in early modern Spain. E-mail: ivb@teol.ku.dk |
David Lebovitch DahlAffiliated researcher Ph.D. in History, EUI; Cand.Mag. Italian, UCPH. E-mail: dld@teol.ku.dk |
Fabio GigoneAffiliated researcher E-mail: fgi@teol.ku.dk |
Nuno GranchoPostdoctoral Researcher, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow Architecture, University of Coimbra. Planning and Urban Design, University of Porto. PhD in Architecture and Urbanism, University of Coimbra. Nuno Grancho is an architect, researcher, teacher, and historian of objects, buildings, cities, and landscapes. His work studies how spatial practices of power and resistance through architectures and cities of struggle shape the modernity and coloniality of South Asia from the early 16th century to the present day. His research projects are focused on questions of human and material agency, the epistemology and geopolitics of architecture and urbanism as a technique of social intervention. Of particular importance to his work and writings are the spatial-morphological arrangements in architecture and cities that identify and enable the private as withdrawal from the world and the public as engagement with that same world and simultaneously, the tension between these dichotomies. From September 2021 until August 2024, he was a Postdoctoral researcher and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies, with the research project “Privacy on the move: two-way Processes, Data and Legacy of Danish metropolitan and colonial Architecture and Urbanism”. E-mail: nuno.grancho@teol.ku.dk |
Anni Haahr HenriksenAffiliated researcher At the Centre for Privacy Studies, my work focuses on the mind as an inward private sphere in Elizabethan England (1558-1603). My work is multi-disciplinary, as I draw on legal, religious, political, and literary sources in order to trace the developing vocabulary related to a privacy of the mind emerging in the period. More specifically, I draw on the legislation of the Court of High Commission, the Edwardian and Elizabethan Homilies, the works of William Perkins and Justus Lipsius, and William Shakespeare’s long narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. The PhD thesis is now available online: https://teol.ku.dk/Forskning/publikationer/ |
Jesper JakobsenResearcher at Division of Book History, Department of Arts and Culture, Lund University. BA and MA in History, University of Copenhagen 2009; Ph.D. in History, University of Copenhagen 2017. My research focuses on Print Culture and the practical implementation of urban regulation in eighteenth-century Scandinavia with a particular interest in the urban centres printing hubs of Copenhagen and Altona. This includes the social consequenses of the introduction of professional police forces, and the societal impact of increased production, dissemination, and commercialization of printed texts. I curently work on a project called “The Scoundrel Years: Scandinavian impudence of the press and print industry, c. 1760-1800”. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council. E-mail: jesper.jakobsen@teol.ku.dk |
Christine JeanneretAssociate Professor I am a musicologist and an associate professor at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen and Rosenborg Castle. My research focuses on early modern music, sound studies and aural history, with a particular interest for performance and staging, soundscapes and gender studies. I have held several positions and fellowships in Europe (University of Geneva, École française de Rome, University of Copenhagen, Centre de recherche du château de Versailles) and at leading institutions in the United States (Yale and Columbia Universities). My research has a wide impact, notably through my collaboration with several early music ensembles, and more recently with museums, in order to convey and share research in the unique forms of performance and exhibitions. In 2017 I was awarded Queen Margrethe II’s Rome prize for my outstanding research. I am currently working as a writer, sound artist and curator, preparing an innovative immersive soundscapes exhibition at Rosenborg Castle (opening in March 2025). E-mail: christine.jeanneret@teol.ku.dk |
Sanne MaekelbergPostdoctoral Researcher at the research section of History, Theory, and Criticism of the Department of Architecture, University of Leuven (KU Leuven) PhD in architectural engineering, University of Leuven (KU Leuven) My research focuses on Early Modern court architecture and the itinerant lifestyle of the nobility. As an architectural engineer I combine approaches from architectural history with an interest in digital visualization techniques, especially digital reconstructions and mapping. E-mail: sma@teol.ku.dk |
Asta MønstedPostdoctoral researcher. PhD (2022), MA (2016) and BA (2013) in Prehistoric Archaeology at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen. My research focuses on the archaeological remains, embedded worldviews and oral histories of the Greenlandic Inuit. At the Center for Privacy, I am investigating how the Greenlandic Inuit of the 19th century navigated the public and private spheres using filtered searches based on selected keywords. The primary sources for this study are orally transmitted stories collected in Greenland from 1735 to 1900 A.D. Mønsted has finished her postdoctoral stay at the Center for Privacy, and is currently working as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. |
Sari NaumanPostdoctoral Researcher PhD in History, University of Gothenburg My research focuses on Early Modern political culture, specifically relations of trust and uncertainty. Previously, I have studied the dwindling usage of political oaths, private relationships in diplomatic culture, and hospitality towards strangers. Currently, I am investigating refugee reception and internal displacement in the early eighteenth century, and during my time at the centre, I will especially focus on issues of solitude and precariousness. The Swedish Research Council has previously (2020-2022) funded Sari Nauman's research, the title of that project is 'Hidden rebellions: Information control in Sweden, 1680-1720'. E-mail: sna@teol.ku.dk |
Oskar Jacek RojewskiPostdoctoral Researcher He finished a postdoctoral stay at the University of Copenhagen, working on the Early Modern collections History with funding from The Generalitat Valenciana: subventions for the postdoctoral training APOSTD 2019 with the project “Private and public in the Cabinet of curiosities during the 16th Century”. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, working on the mobility of Flemish court painters between Early Modern European courts |
Solmaz SadeghiMarie Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at the Royal Danish Academy (IBD) and ETH Zurich (gta). M.Arch., Ph.D. in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture, Politecnico di Milano (AUIC). Thesis: Homo-Tech Wall, the evolution of the civic wall in the Tectonic Culture since 1850. My research field lies within Architectural Construction and the City. In my current research, IBridge, I focus on early modern Inhabitable Bridges, walled-off paths, and gated communities to reveal the emergence of public privacy beyond the privatization of paths. IBridge focuses on Old London Bridge and the Pont de Notre Dame in Paris at the intersection of architecture and public policy, to analyze how privacy performs in the public realm far from private spaces. Parallel to my research, I currently teach at the Master Programme of Spatial Design at the Royal Danish Academy, where public privacy is embodied in shared interiors with tectonics. At PRIVACY, IBridge relates to studies of early modern European law and privacy, social and political dimensions of early modern privacy, and religious culture and public control. E-mail: skha@kglakademi.dk |
Carmen García Sánchez Postdoctoral Researcher Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at The Royal Danish Academy - Architecture Design Conservation, Institute of Architecture and Design BA and MA in Architecture, specialised in Building Construction, and Ph.D. in Architectural Design from School of Architecture, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. I am an experienced practicing architect and a Ph.D. in Architectural Design. As a MSCA fellow, I carry out my research Nature-In, at KADK. It is an artistic, technical and historical research project, that gains knowledge from our architectural heritage – in the form of exemplary postwar-Danish and traditional-Japanese buildings that contribute via rich multi-sensory stimulation to the connecting of their interior space with the surrounding nature. I develop this through Architectural Interior, Landscape, and Biophilic Design approaches with a focus on linking architectural research to future practice. The main aim is to enhance the health and wellbeing of communities through daily interaction with Nature. I also teach at the Master’s program Spatial Design at the Institute of Architecture and Design (KADK). E-mail: cgar@kglakademi.dk |
Niccolo ValmoriPostdoctoral Research Associate at King's College, French Department. I am working on the AHRC funded project "Radical Translations: the Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815)". My focus is on the cultural transfer between France and Italy (in both directions) during the Revolutionary period. |
Lee Palmer WandelProfessor, Affiliated Faculty At present, I am working on a book, tentatively titled The Matter of the Liturgy, on the changing understanding of the relationship between matter and divine revelation in the liturgy in the sixteenth century. This book builds on work I have done on iconoclasm, the Eucharist, and the sixteenth-century rethinking of the nature of Christian knowledge. E-mail: lpw@teol.ku.dk |
Florian WöllerAssociate Professor at The Section of Church History, The Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. |
PRIVACY scholars
For more information about each scholar at PRIVACY, their background, research and funding, read our list of curricula vitae here.