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.
Email: 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. |
Student assistent
Emilie 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. Email: elm@teol.ku.dk |
Core Scholars
Peter Thule Kristensen
Professor of Spatial Design, The School of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservations (KADK), Copenhagen, DK.
My field of research lies within History of Architecture and Interior. The Masters Programme Spatial Design at Institute of Architecture and Design has ca. 60 international students of architecture and design and a focus on spatial design from among others, a historical, anthropological and tectonic/material-based point of view.
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![]() Annabel BrettReader 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.
Email: asb21@cam.ac.uk
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Charlotte Christensen-NuguesSenior Lecturer in History of Ideas & Sciences, University of Lund, SE. |
![]() Philippe Cocatre-ZilgienProfessor of Legal History, Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas, FR.
My research focuses on Roman Law.
Email: 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.
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Scientific Staff
![]() Paolo AstorriPostdoctoral Researcher 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. Email: paolo.astorri@teol.ku.dk |
![]() David Lebovitch Dahl Scientific assistant Ph.D. in History, EUI; Cand.Mag. Italian, UCPH. David assists the research of the centre director. Email: dld@teol.ku.dk |
![]() Fabio GigonePhD Fellow Email: fgi@teol.ku.dk |
![]() Michaël GreenPostdoctoral Researcher
PhD in Religious studies, University of Groningen.
My research lies within religious history and the history of education and networks. I am focusing on the religious element of privacy during the Early Modern period, and especially on different religious groups within PRIVACY’s case studies. For my research, my sources will be books, correspondences and sermons as well as diaries.
Email: mgr@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.22
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![]() Anni Haahr HenriksenPhD Fellow My research focuses on the idea of silence as both a private inward space and a possible public threat. In my research, I explore the paradoxical notions of privacy in the acts of speech and non-speech, mapping the development of notions of privacy during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Email: ahh@teol.ku.dk |
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![]() Christine JeanneretAssociate Professor I am a musicologist and my research focuses on early modern music, sound and court studies, with a particular interest for performance and staging, opera, the body on stage, cultural exchanges and gender studies. At PRIVACY, I am the PI of SOUND, an innovative research aiming at listening, hearing and reconstructing the soundscapes of the Danish court at Rosenborg castle. How did the past sound and what can we learn about the court by studying its soundscapes? The court is a privileged space to study privacy, gender, etiquette, and rituals through its sonic aspects. Email: christine.jeanneret@teol.ku.dk |
Søren Frank Jensen
PhD fellow
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.
Email: sfj@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.19
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![]() Natacha Klein KäferPostdoctoral Researcher 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. Email: 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. Email: npk@teol.ku.dk |
![]() Sanne MaekelbergPostdoctoral Researcher 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. Email: sma@teol.ku.dk |
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![]() Lars Cyril NørgaardAssistant Professor
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Natália da Silva PerezPostdoctoral Researcher
My expertise comprises women’s knowledge practices as well as artistic and intellectual production in the early modern period, especially in hybrid communities that used French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese as their languages. At PRIVACY, I focus on how women’s ability to work was influenced by their attempts to control their fertility. Women’s modes of subsistence and ways to structure their lives (working for payment, marrying, entering into religious orders) often entailed managing when or whether to get pregnant. From a transnational and comparative perspective, I endeavour to reconstruct and understand the experiences of sexual and reproductive privacy for women of high and low social status, as well as their interactions with their families, communities, and authorities. I engage historical material about the religious, legal, and intellectual landscapes that helped shape early modern understandings of sexual and reproductive privacy, in an effort to conduct an intersectional feminist analysis of the documents available to me. Email: nsp@teol.ku.dk |
![]() Frank Ejby PoulsenPostdoctoral Researcher PhD in history, EUI. Cand.scient.pol., UCPH. LLB, LLM, Panthéon-Sorbonne University. My research lies within the field of the intellectual history of law. My project focuses on natural law and its connection to natural philosophy in the Early Modern period. Within this framework, I analyse the varying delimitations between the public and the private in legal and political theory. Email: frank.ejby.poulsen@teol.ku.dk |
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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. Email: mar@teol.ku.dk |
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Kristian Mejrup Postdoctoral Researcher, Guest Researcher at PRIVACY Cand.theol., UCPH. PhD in Church History, UCPH. I am currently working on two essays. One is on the Royal Orphanage on Nytorv, Copenhagen (1727–1795) and the official documents that staged the king as supporter and amplifier of private devotion and charity. The orphanage was influenced by German Pietism and promulgated a strange blend of religious devotion, education, and modern enlightened standards. The other essay I am writing concerns the Danish reception of a book on decorum that stemmed from Pietist Halle. It was translated into Danish and Latin in the mid 18th century. It is my hypothesis that this book’s attempt to formulate a middle position for religious devotion and civility had the – perhaps unintended – consequence of secularizing religious concept by translating or displacing them. Email: krm@teol.ku.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. |
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Florian WöllerAssociate Professor at The Section of Church History, The Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. |