Anna Nilsson Hammar has been appointed Associate Professor in History at Lund University.  Being one of the founders and a deputy director of LUCK, she has been dedicated both to methodological questions within the history of knowledge and to research concerning early modern knowledge communities, everyday knowledge and the capacity to act, and religious knowledge.

“The environment at LUCK and the collaborations we have built over the years, have been essential both professionally and socially – it has been inspiring, challenging, and incredibly informative in so many ways”, Anna says.

In her latest project, working together with colleague Svante Norrhem, Nilsson Hammar investigated the lives of servants and workers in early modern aristocratic estate organisations, delving into working conditions, discipline and socialization efforts and, not least, into the bureaucratic systems of these organisations that sparked interaction between masters and servants through petitions, creating specific conditions for knowledge circulation and negotiations. A unique and extensive archive of petitions to the Swedish aristocrat Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (1622-1686) along with instructions, correspondence and accounts, served as a basis for the study which resulted in the book Serving Aristocracy: Negotiation, Learning and Mobility in an Early Modern Knowledge Community, published in 2025 in the series Knowledge Societies in History at Routledge (ed. Sven Dupré and Wijnand Mijnhardt).

As for now, Nilsson Hammar is developing a new project concerning the local effects of the Swedish reduction of noble property to the crown in the 1680s, and its hitherto unexplored significance for workers, servants and local communities. She is also Deputy Head of the Department of History at Lund University and a coordinator of the Bachelor and Master’s Programmes in History.