Resumé

I originally wanted to become a nuclear phycisist, like Marie Curie. I actually did a stint of work experience during year 10 at high school at Risø (Denmark), which at that time (1987) was a research institute focused on nuclear energy. I remember being completely starstruck with meeting Jakob Bohr, the grandson of Niels Bohr. My poor performances in maths, however, were a good indicator of the futility of this pursuit, and so instead, through strange twists of fate, I began studying theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1995.

Although I come from an non-religious background, I have always been interested in religion, particularly Christianity as a socio-historical phenomenon. By this I mean that my interest is particularly focused on the past, and how Christianity has been shaped by socio-economic developments, and in turn has had a strong social impact on Western civilisation and on European colonialism.

After I completed my theology degree in 2001, I taught New Testament at the Faculty of Theology in Copenhagen for four years. During this time, I made my first trip to Greenland to teach at the University in Nuuk, Ilisimatusarfik. After meeting my partner, who is Australian, I successfully applied for a PhD scholarship in Sydney, at Macquarie University, which I took up in 2006. This was in a completely new field, Cultural Studies.

Moving into a new field of study in a new country enabled and allowed me to draw on the full range (textual work, church history, and philosophy/theory) of my theological background to analyse the role of Protestantism in the Danish colonisation of Greenland. According to the disciplinary conventions of theology, my specialisation in New Testament studies meant that I would have been expected to remain in this field. Cultural studies enabled me to transcend this limitation. After completing my PhD, I moved to Berlin to take up a postdoctoral position in a PhD school for Gender Research at Humboldt University, which was yet another new country and another new field, namely Gender Studies.

During this time, I began working with eighteenth century manuscripts as part of a research project into the gendered organisation and subjectification practices of the Moravian Brethren. I taught myself how to read Kurrent or old German script. The following three years saw a return to religion and biblical studies in the research project entitled “The Sacred Economy” at the University of Newcastle, Australia, after which I received a two year research grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung to carry out an independent project which was focused on Moravian missions and comparative history. In the course of this research career, I have developed a set of skills which includes archival expertise, theoretical fluency (post-structuralist, gender, Frankfurt school), and insight into the social function of Christianity in different periods. This helped me obtain a Liselotte Kirchner scholarship at the Francke Foundation in Halle, Germany, in 2019.

My CV thus has a strong interdisciplinary and international profile, complemented by visiting research and teaching positions at international universities (Australian National University, Oslo University, University of Greenland) and more than 50 conference papers at a very large range of international conferences (North America, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Finland, England, and China). I have published extensively in various fields (Cultural Studies, Biblical Studies, Religious Studies and especially Moravian Studies, archival studies and colonial history) in English, Danish and German. One article has been translated into Chinese, and another into Turkish. I have gained editorial experience through a number of edited volumes and work on the editorial boards of several journals.