Susann Holmberg defended her thesis, Contracting Knowledge: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Norway, at the University of Oslo on October 2 2020. The thesis is a contribution to the field of early modern knowledge history and was supervised by Erling Sandmo and Morten Fink-Jensen. This thesis explores the knowledge of venereal disease in eighteenth-century Norway. This is…

Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Visiting Fellowship Programme in the History of Knowledge unfortunately has to be postponed again. It is our intention that a call for the Visiting Fellowship Programme for the autumn 2021 can be published in April 2021. More information will be posted on this website in due course.

In the last half-century, the Nordic countries have increasingly been refashioned as self-proclaimed ‘knowledge societies’. Educational reform, from compulsory primary schooling to folk high schools and the expansion of free university education, is also a central element of narratives describing the region’s path to modernity and the making of the Nordic welfare states. To gain…

David Larsson Heidenblad’s blog on academic writing and postdoctoral experiences is back! The second instalment of “Ett år av akademiskt skrivande” will focus on the early phases of the research process: the probing of archives, surveying new strands of literature, the writing of seed-money grant applications, and in general finding your footing in a new…

We hereby forward an invitation from our friends at Utrecht University: All are invited to join the second (virtual) meeting of the History of Knowledge Seminar Series @Utrecht University with a lecture by prof. Peter Burke (Cambridge) on Thursday 24 September 2020. Bringing together leading scholars of both older and younger generations with different backgrounds and approaches, this bimonthly seminar series explores the past,…

All seminars will be conducted via Zoom. Contact johan.ostling@hist.lu.se for a link to the meeting, before each seminar. The first three seminars will be held in Swedish, the latter two in English. For participation in the “History of knowledge meets history of education”-seminar, do not forget to register (link below). The last seminar will be…

In a recent article in Scandinavian Journal of History, Erik Bodensten examines the societal history of potato knowledge in early modern Sweden. In the early nineteenth century, the potato became an important staple crop in Sweden. This transformation proved highly important to Swedish society, as it helped secure the rapid population growth then underway. However,…

A growing number of Nordic scholars are exploring various aspects of the history of knowledge. Recently, Johanna Skurnik (University of Turku) has received funding from the Academy of Finland for the project “Producing and mobilizing geographical knowledge in Finnish society, 1850s–1930s”. As a part of this project, she will be a visiting researcher at the…