In 2026, a number of research projects with a history of knowledge dimension are ongoing:

Scholarly Journals and the Disciplinary Formation of the Modern Humanities in Sweden, c. 1850–1920 (Isak Hammar)

Departing from the recent resurgence of the history of the humanities, the project explores the importance of 19^th century disciplinary journals for the formation of the modern humanities. Comparing Sweden with international contexts, the project aims to trace how the credible scholar was imagined and how the tradecraft of scholarship was articulated in journals from a number of humanities disciplines.

Coerced Circulation of Knowledge (Lisa Hellman)

This project examines how knowledge circulated across early modern Eurasia — from Northern Europe, through Central Asia, and to Japan — through coerced actors such as prisoners of war, slaves, and captives. With an empirical focus on diplomatic, geographic, and linguistic knowledge, and drawing on social, cultural, and intellectual history, it argues that coercion was not an obstacle to the circulation of knowledge but one of its primary mechanisms, and asks how the conditions of captivity shaped what was known, how it was recorded, and where it travelled. The project centres on the RJ-funded project “Circulation in Shackles”, but also connects to the PhD projects of Lisa Phongsavath (University of Bonn) and Christine Mae Sarito (University of Bonn), and to the RJ-funded project “Global Diplomacy: Recentring International Relations 1400–1850” with Guido van Meersbergen (University of Warwick) and Birgit Tremml-Werner (Stockholm University)

Secrets to Patents: Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900 (Natacha Klein Käfer)

The Research Environment Secrets to Patents investigates the long-term history of how life-saving and health-improving medicines became for-profit commodities from 1500 to 1900. Focusing on the Atlantic Colonial Nexus, the project’s team will investigate the strategies that different historical agents used to claim ownership of medicinal knowledge. Funded by the Swedish Research Council, the Research Environment includes Lund University, the University of Copenhagen, and Federal University of Santa Maria (BR).

California Dreamin’: Silicon Valley Knowledge, Culture, and Capital in late 20th Century Sweden (David Larsson Heidenblad)

Since the term ‘Silicon Valley’ was coined in the 1970s, the region has generated dreams of a prosperous high-technological future. The purpose of this project is to study how the model of Silicon Valley and its knowledge culture came to influence Swedish society through innovations such as a small cap stock exchange, private venture capital firms, and an influx of entrepreneurial management literature.

Everyman’s Capitalism: The Popularization of Stock Saving in Sweden, c. 1950–2020 (David Larsson Heidenblad)

Over the last few decades, Sweden has become a nation of everyman investors. Individual ownership of stocks and mutual funds stands out in relation to other European nations. But when, how, and why did this happen? This project seeks the roots of popular financialisation in the political struggles of the welfare state era and depicts how this new culture evolved in tandem with digitalization and the formation and dissemination of popular financial knowledge.

Plagiarism Hunting in Early Modern Europe: Knowledge Circulation and Its Limits (Christa Lundberg)

This project investigates how and why European scholars in the seventeenth century began to scrutinize plagiarism. It examines Latin treatises on plagiarism, disputes discussed in scholarly journals, and responses from academies and universities. By foregrounding a neglected epistemic dimension of plagiarism, the project sheds light on how the boundaries and norms of knowledge circulation were negotiated and reshaped in the early modern period.

Shared Knowledge: Conscience and Confessionalization in Early Modern Sweden (Anna Nilsson Hammar)

A project investigating the role of conscience to processes of religious consolidation and confessionalization in early modern Sweden, from the religious turmoil in the late 16th century to the emergence of a monoconfessional state during the course of the 17th century.

Knowing Nuclear Weapons Tests: Witness Activism and Oppositional Knowledge in the Cold War Colonial Pacific (Anton Öhman)

Building on the history of knowledge, archival studies, and Pacific history, this dissertation examines how activists in French Polynesia and beyond produced and circulated oppositional knowledge about nuclear weapons testing from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Focusing on witness activism, the project explores how testimony, archives, and transnational networks were used to contest state secrecy, scientific uncertainty, and colonial power. In doing so, it shows how often marginalised actors claimed epistemic authority and helped shape debates on recognition, compensation, and nuclear disarmament.

The Europeanisation of the Universities: Transforming Knowledge Institutions from within, c. 1985–2010 (Johan Östling, Maria Simonsen, Karl Haikola, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, Martin Kristoffer Hamre)

This project analyses the Europeanisation of universities during a quarter-century when a new knowledge space was established, from the mid-1980s to around 2010. By focusing on five universities situated in different European contexts – Ghent, Aalborg, Valladolid, Berlin (Humboldt) and Lund – we provide insight into how Europeanisation has taken place and changed higher education. The project is not only a contribution to the history of universities, but to the history of European integration, the so-called knowledge society and contemporary history more generally.

Ignorance and Eclecticism: Ludvig Holberg’s Comedies and the History of Knowledge (Andreas Tranvik)

This dissertation presents a novel account of representations of knowledge in the Danish-Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg’s (1684–1754) dramatic writings. Drawing on perspectives from the history of ideas, intellectual history, and the history of knowledge alike, the study argues for a dialectical understanding of the much-discussed topic of knowledge and ignorance, epistemology and agnotology, in Holberg’s plays. In doing so, the study also expands on recent formalist attempts in literary studies, and demonstrates, by way of approaching drama as performed eclecticism, how literary forms can converge with epistemic forms.

Women, Survivors, Physicians: Medical Knowledge and Bioethics During and After the Holocaust (Victoria Van Orden Martínez)

Gendered notions of “care” can be both useful and transgressive when applied to the history of women in medicine, not least during the Second World War and the Holocaust, when men and women were forced by the Nazis to work as medical laborers. This project complicates simplistic notions of women’s work as forced medical laborers during the Holocaust as “care work” by using knowledge as a lens through which to examine their medical work during and after the war. In doing so, it aims to contribute new perspectives of medical knowledge – particularly bioethical knowledge – stemming from the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Knowing Luther: Publishing, Translating, Representing and Reading Luther in Sweden c. 1570–1620 (Kajsa Weber)

Building on the history of knowledge, media and book history as well as Reformation studies, this project explores the circulation of Martin Luther’s texts in Sweden around 1600. As a consequence of the Reformation, Luther’s writings became a form of standardized knowledge that a small number of actors considered important for a wider public to access. This project is the first to investigate how ordinary Lutherans outside the German-speaking lands were expected to know and engage with Luther during the age of confessionalization. 

Meritocratic Lives. A European History of Experience, 1600–1810 (Asger Wienberg)

Combining perspectives from the fields of administrative history, the cultural history of social mobility, and media history, this project explores how and why meritocracy – the idea that social order should be based on skill, hard work, or personal achievement – became part of the everyday lives, experiences, and expectations of a growing number of people in the early modern Baltic Sea region. Particular emphasis is given to the small practices, techniques, and genres as well as to the informational regimes that shaped how merit and deservingness could be articulated and recognised within order-based societies and developing states.