Staff

Centre Director

Mette Birkedal Bruun

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

Centre Administration

Maj Riis Poulsen

Head 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 Christensen

Academic 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

Billede af Lucas

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 Brett

Professor 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 

Philippe Cocatre-Zilgien

Professor of Legal History, Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas, FR.
 
My research focuses on Roman Law.
E-mail: pccz@wanadoo.fr 
 

Maarten Delbeke

Professor 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.

Peter Thule Kristensen

Professor of Spatial Design, Department of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation (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.

E-mail: pthul@kadk.dk 
Room: 5C.0.07

Karen Lauterbach

Associate 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 Astorri

Assistant 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 
Room: 5C.0.24

David Lebovitch Dahl

Scientific assistant

Ph.D. in History, EUI; Cand.Mag. Italian, UCPH.

David assists the research of the centre director.

E-mail: dld@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.09

Nuno Grancho

Postdoctoral Researcher, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow

Architecture, University of Coimbra. Planning and Urban Design, University of Porto. PhD in Architecture and Urbanism, University of Coimbra.

My research examines how architectures and cities of struggle have shaped the modernity of South Asia. Within this field, my 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. At PRIVACY, I will start a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project that aims to produce an understanding of how historical notions of privacy in Danish architecture and urbanism since the 17th century are a bilateral mechanism between West and East.

E-mail: nuno.grancho@teol.ku.dk 
Room: 5C.0.07

Hannah Katharina Hjorth

PhD 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.

Room: 5C.0.19

Christine Jeanneret

Associate 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.

E-mail: christine.jeanneret@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.12

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 Käfer

Assistant 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   
Room: 5C.0.10

Natalie Patricia Körner

Assistant 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
Room: 5C.0.20

Johannes Ljungberg 

Postdoctoral Researcher

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 
Room: 5C.0.14

Thomas Lyngby

Visiting 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.  

Asta Mønsted

Postdoctoral researcher.

PhD (2022), MA (2016) and BA (2013) in Prehistoric Archaeology at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen.

My research centers around the archaeological remains, embedded worldview and oral history of the Greenlandic Inuit. How may the oral history of the Greenlandic Inuit provide a new perspective on the archaeological excavations and surveys we conduct? In my PhD thesis I draw on Inuit stories registered in Greenland between 1735 and 1981. These stories not only suggest new ways for us to interpret the built structures and natural landscape of the Greenlandic Inuit, but they may also inspire new ways of thinking and designing the future housing architecture and urban spaces of the Arctic.

E-mail: amd@teol.ku.dk

Room: 5C.0.16

Lars Cyril Nørgaard 

Associate Professor


Cand.teol., UCPH. PhD in Church History, UCPH.Visiting Scholar, Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Durham. Visiting Scholar, Centre Roland Mousnier, Sorbonne IV, Paris. Postdoc, Faculty of Theology, UCPH.                         

My research centers on the paradoxes of religious withdrawal from the world. I have worked extensively on lay devotion in Early Modern Europe and take specific interest in its material underpinnings. 

E-mail: lan@teol.ku.dk 
Room: 5C.0.06

Bastian Vaucanson

Carlsberg Internationalisation Fellow

PhD, Cand.theol., UCPH 

My research focuses on notions – and absence – of privacy in the city of Versailles during the last third of the reign of Louis XIV (1682-1715). I examine how the devotional ideal of interiority plays out in François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon’s (1651-1715) tutoring of Le petit dauphin, Louis de France, duc de Bourgogne (1682-1712) in the years 1689-99. 

My Carlsberg Internationalisation project examines the arrival of the French Ursuline nuns in Québec in the 17th century, their religious practice and encounter with indigenous cultures.

E-mail: bva@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.19

Viktor Wreström

PhD 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.

Room: 5C.0.19

Hui-Yi Yang

Guest Researcher

MA (2023) in Architecture, the Master’s Programme Spatial Design, Royal Danish Academy Architecture, Design, Conservation (KADK)

My theoretically orientated Master's project at Spatial Design at KADK focuses on ‘shadowscapes’ in domestic interiors in Copenhagen, analyzing the relationship between intimacy, shadow, and window. At PRIVACY, my research proposal involves a comparative study of privacy within the bed box of Rembrandt’s House during the residency of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, from 1639 to 1642, and the bed within the Siraya ethnicity's House in Formosa (now Taiwan) during Dutch colonization (1624 to 1662) and after. The aim is to understand how the inception of 'privacy' influenced the Siraya’s worldly rituals performed in relation to sleep, illness, and death.

E-mail: hyy@teol.ku.dk

Room: 5C.0.19

Affiliated Scholars

Martin Almbjär

Postdoctoral 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

Sara Ayres

Visiting 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
Room: 5C.0.09

Jelena Bakic

Her 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 Benison

BA (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 Bicak

Postdoctoral 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

Fabio Gigone

Affiliated researcher

PhD 

M.Arch., Università Iuav di Venezia
 My research focuses on the relationship between power and architecture in the Early Modern period. I am focusing on the architectural apparatuses deployed in Versailles, which defined the court and a new idea of privacy within the Louis XIV’s kingdom between 1682 and 1715. My research will consider a wide range of archival sources and will produce an autonomous body of design investigations based on the drawing tool. 

E-mail: fgi@teol.ku.dk 

Anni Haahr Henriksen

Affiliated researcher

PhD in History, University of Copenhagen. MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University. MA in English and History, University of Copenhagen.

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 Jakobsen

Researcher 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

Sanne Maekelberg

Postdoctoral 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

 
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. 

 E-mail: krm@teol.ku.dk 

Sari Nauman

Postdoctoral 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 Rojewski

Postdoctoral Researcher

BA in History and Art History at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland); MA in Cultural Heritage and Art History at the University of Valencia; PhD in Art History at University Jaume I and the University of Valencia; visiting fellow at Université Catholique de Louvain; assistant professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice.

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 Sadeghi

Marie 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

 
CarmenCarmen 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).

   

Niccolo Valmori

Postdoctoral 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 Wandel

Professor, Affiliated Faculty
WARF Michael Baxandall and Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History, University of Wisconsin - Madison

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 Wöller

Associate Professor at The Section of Church History, The Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen.
 
My research concerns two areas in the first 1500 years of Church History: On one hand, I work on theology as a scientific discipline in the then newly founded universities of the late Middle Ages. On the other hand, I investigate street processions through late-antique cities, emphasizing their performative qualities. A central part of my research agenda focuses on conflicts between private and public forms of religion in street processions.
 
E-mail: flw@teol.ku.dk