Maria Simonsen, Nordic advisory board member, is pleased to announce a new exciting project about the history of knowledge and university history, Knowledge for the World: The history of Aalborg University, 1974-2024.

In 2024, Aalborg University celebrates its 50th anniversary. For this up-coming anniversary, the two Danish historians, Maria Simonsen and Mogens Rüdiger, is writing the history of Aalborg University from a perspective of the history of knowledge.

Aalborg University was one of several new universities that were established in Denmark during the 1960´s and 1970´s. Located on the outskirts of the city of Aalborg in Northern Jutland, Aalborg University played an important role in reforming and transforming higher education in Denmark. Aalborg was not established as a university in name, at first, but as a university center. This was seen as a more experimental institution, than the traditional universities in Copenhagen and Aarhus, both in terms of research and pedagogical.

In a novel approach to university history, Maria Simonsen (PI) and Mogens Rüdiger will investigate the history of Aalborg University as an arena of knowledge. In this research project titled “Knowledge for the World” Simonsen and Rüdiger will focus on different knowledge perspectives, thereby making the genre less biographically oriented. The emphasis will be on how knowledge has been established and circulated, and how a knowledge culture develops into a dynamic university.

The research project will be running from 2021-2024.

Maria Simonsen:

– I’m very excited about this project. I think that the perspective of history of knowledge provides an opportunity to see Aalborg University in a new light. It will provide a deeper understanding of the university’s goals, meaning and activities over this 50-year time period. I really look forward to discussing the project with the inspirational research environment at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK) in the following years.