We are delighted to announce that Christa Lundberg has received funding from both the Swedish Research Council and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the project “Plagiarism hunting in early modern Europe (c. 1665–1730): Knowledge circulation and its limits” – an impressive achievement. She is currently based at the University of Cambridge but this new project will be hosted by the Department of History in Lund. Congratulations, Christa!

Christa Lundberg describes her project:

“In this project, I will explore why and how European scholars started paying serious attention to plagiarism in the seventeenth century. By examining treatises, journals, correspondences, and institutional archives, I will map changing discourses of plagiarism and originality. One of my central hypotheses is that scholarly plagiarism hunters relied on new media and institutions. Using these tools, they were able to detect plagiarists who had previously flown under the radar. My study will therefore explore the infrastructure of the early modern Republic of Letters from a new angle – highlighting its role in shaping new ideas about knowledge ownership and academic integrity. 

The project also has a theoretical dimension, focusing on the popular concept of ‘knowledge circulation.’ Whereas postmodern theorists have propagated the idea that knowledge is always ‘in transit’ and lacks owners or even originators, I explore how epistemic actors in the early modern period, as now, developed practices and control mechanisms precisely to set limits for knowledge circulation. 

I am very grateful to have received offers of funding from the Swedish Research Council and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and look forward to pursuing this project in close dialogue with researchers at LUCK!”

photo: Kat Steer