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.
 
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.

Email: mrp@teol.ku.dk
Room 5C.0.26

Vera Ada Langstrup Hartmann 

Student assistant 

Vera 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: veraalh@teol.ku.dk


Room 5C.0.26

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.

 
Email: pthul@kadk.dk 
Room: 5C.0.07

Jill Bepler

Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, DE (retired)
 
My research focuses on courtly education as well as dynastic women and their libraries in the 17th century. I also study aristocratic collecting and Early Modern funerary publications.
 

Annabel Brett

Reader 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.

Charlotte Christensen-Nugues

Senior Lecturer in History of Ideas & Sciences, University of Lund, SE. 

My research focuses on marriage and family in medieval and Early Modern legal, religious and political thought. I have analysed areas of conflict and tension between individual and society, private and public, and their historical evolvement.

Email: Charlotte.Christensen@kultur.lu.se

Philippe Cocatre-Zilgien

Professor of Legal History, Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas, FR.
 
My research focuses on Roman Law.
 

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.

Scientific Staff

Paolo Astorri

Postdoctoral 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 
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.

Email: dld@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.09

Fabio Gigone

PhD Fellow

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. 

Email: fgi@teol.ku.dk 
Room: 5C.0.19

Nuno Grancho

Postdoctoral Researcher, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow

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

Email: nuno.grancho@teol.ku.dk 
Room: 5C.0.07

Anni Haahr Henriksen

PhD Fellow

Cand.Mag. UCPH. MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature, University of Cambridge. 

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
Room: 5C.0.19

Jesper Jakobsen

Postdoctural Researcher

Cand.mag. (History), UCPH. Ph.D. in History, UCPH. 

My research interests lie within the field of social history in Early Modern Northern Europe. My previous research has been focusing on Print Culture and Censorship in 18th century Denmark-Norway. At PRIVACY, I will be especially interested in studying the private and the public as function divided spheres.

Email: jesper.jakobsen@teol.ku.dk 
Room: 5C.0.08

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.

Email: christine.jeanneret@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.12

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

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.

Email: jbl@teol.ku.dk 
Room: 5C.0.14

Natacha Klein Käfer

Postdoctoral 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   
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.

Email: npk@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.20

Sanne Maekelberg

Postdoctoral 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
Room: 5C.0.07

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 the use of secrecy and information control in rebellions during Swedish Absolutism, 1680–1720.

The Swedish Research Council funds Sari Nauman's research, the project title is 'Hidden rebellions: Information control in Sweden, 1680-1720'. Her project is funded during 2020-2022.

Email: sna@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.09

Lars Cyril Nørgaard 

Assistant 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. 

Email: lan@teol.ku.dk 
Room: 5C.0.06

Natália da Silva Perez

Postdoctoral Researcher

  • PhD in Early Modern Women's History, Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate U. Kent and F.U. Berlin.
  • MA in Performing Arts Studies, Erasmus Mundus Joint Master U.L. Bruxelles and U. Sevilla
  • BFA in Theatre and French Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

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
Room: 5C.0.16 

Frank Ejby Poulsen

Postdoctoral 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 
Room: 5C.0.18

Oskar Jacek Rojewski

Postdoctoral Researcher

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

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at University of Copenhagen, working on the Early Modern Wunderkammer History. My research compares XVIth century private collections, using inventories, court ordinances and correspondence.

Oskar Rojewski's research is funded by The Generalitat Valenciana: subventions for the postdoctoral training APOSTD 2019. The project is 'Private and public in the Cabinet of curiosities during 16th Century'.

Email: ojr@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.09

Bastian Vaucanson

PhD Fellow
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. 

Email: bva@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.

Email: 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.

Email: saa@teol.ku.dk
Room: 5C.0.09

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.

Email: ivb@teol.ku.dk

Dustin Michael Neighbors

Postdoctoral Researcher

PhD in History, University of York.

I specialize in the history of monarchy and court culture, with emphasis on the performativity of gender, the development of political culture and crafting spectacles within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My research focuses on the private and public nature of the European courts, primarily through spectacles and royal progresses (itinerant monarchies). I am particularly interested in the idea of political privacy, how that affected royal/electoral authority, and influenced European political culture, as well as foreign relations.

 Email: dmn@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. 

 Email: krm@teol.ku.dk 
   

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.

Email: 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.
 
Email: flw@teol.ku.dk