Organisation profile

PRIVACY is hosted by

The Department of Church History, The Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen

in association with:

The Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen.

The School of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy - Architecture, Design, Conservation, Copenhagen

and in collaboration with:

The Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Institute of History of Ideas and Sciences at Lund University, Sweden.

Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.

The Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

Institut d’Histoire du Droit, Université Paris II, France.

The Subject GroupPolitical Thought and Intellectual History, University of Cam­bridge, United Kingdom.

Research in the organisation

PRIVACY’s scholarly goals are grounded in the overall aim to launch privacy studies as a new re­search field.

We aim to develop

• systematized historical knowledge of dynamics that shape, induce or curb privacy in society,
• an interdisciplinary method equipped to grasp such dy­namics and
• a strong and vibrant international research environment dedicated to high-profile historical research and equipped to incite a much broader investigation of privacy.

PRIVACY brings together the fields of Church History, Architectural History, Legal History and the History of Ideas in a novel interdisciplinary approach based on disciplinary integrationand site-based analysis.

Our principal focus rests with the period 1500-1800. The wider aim of PRIVA­CY is, however, to mobilize knowledge of past notions of privacy as a resource that can help decode the intrica­cies of present concerns related to the indi­vidual’s place in society.