In the first week of April, five researchers will be in Lund as visiting scholars: Barbara Hof (Zurich), Laura Loporcaro (Ghent), Ann-Sophie Levidis (Australian National University), Floris Solleveld (Bristol/Amsterdam) and Daniel Töpper (Berlin). They have been selected in fierce competition to be part of the LUCK’s International Visiting Fellowship Programme. During their stay in Lund, they will present their research and interact with local researchers.

Read more about the visiting fellows:

Barbara Hof is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne and a guest lecturer at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. She joins LUCK to write the conclusion of her first book. It will contribute to the scholarly discussion of the origins of the knowledge society. Specifically, it focuses on the transatlantic transfer of knowledge through training programs in the nuclear energy field during the first two decades of the Cold War. Thematically, her publications cover a variety of topics, including the histories of particle physics, fusion science, computing, artificial intelligence, and science activism.

Ann-Sophie Levidis is an Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University (ANU). Her prior engagements include positions at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Harvard University and the University of Hitotsubashi. Her academic focus is the history of modern France. She received the Jean-Baptiste Duroselle Prize in the History of International Relations and the Seal of Excellence of the European Council. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her first monograph, The Saigon Trials, The End of World War II in Asia and the French Diplomatie in Asia, will be forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. At the ANU, she started a new monograph on the production of knowledge in the transnational grassroots movement against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Laura Loporcaro is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University. A classicist by training (DPhil Oxon 2022), she currently works on the history of classical philology in early 19th-century Germany as part of the ERC project Philology as Science in 19th-Century Europe. She is particularly interested in the position of Latin during that period, in questions of (dis)continuity in philological practice, and in processes of canon-building in the history of knowledge, topics she approaches through the figure of Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824). An article demonstrating the forgotten substratum of Latin learning in Wolf’s epoch-making philhellenist essay Darstellung der Alterthums-Wissenschaft recently appeared in the Classical Receptions Journal (17, nr. 1), and her first book, Reading Quintilian. Didactic Authority in the Institutio oratoria, was published with Oxford University Press in February 2025. In Lund, she will be engaging with Wolf’s scholarship on Cicero.

Floris Solleveld is currently a Research Fellow at the Vossius Centre, University of Amsterdam. His PhD thesis (Nijmegen, 2018) was an investigation of transformations in the humanities around 1800; at LUCK he will work on the monograph based on this, under the working title After Erudition. As a postdoc at KU Leuven and the University of Bristol he worked on colonial-era studies of Indigenous languages and missionary translation networks. Other research interests include the early modern Republic of Letters and its afterlives, historical epistemology, and the visualization of knowledge.

Daniel Töpper works at the Department of History of Education at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. His dissertation focused on school bureaucracy, age-grading and teacher training. In an ongoing research project, he is responsible for reconstructing the knowledge production of school administrators in Prussia. His second research interest reconstructs the emergence of sex education as a cross-curricular theme in the 20th century. He is currently compiling a collection of (digital) sex education materials in Berlin and conceptualising knowledge-based interventions in the history of schooling.