I am pleased to announce a new cultural heritage output.
In my capacity as a museum department head, I have researched and written the text for a new cultural heritage sign. I have also produced the map for the sign.
The sign has been professionally translated into Sámi.
On the 18th of July 2026, the sign was officially unveiled at Veines in Kongsfjord, Finnmark County, Norway.
The information sign was funded by a grant from the Norwegian Sámi Parliament.
I have a book review out in History of Universities XXXVIII, no. 2 (2026).
The book I have reviewed is a monograph on Nordic universities in the long eighteenth century by Mikkel Munthe Jensen. It covers the changes universities in the Nordic region underwent in the long eighteenth century.
I started writing this review a good while ago, at the encouragement of Professor Mordechai Feingold (Caltech). But life, as it often does, came in the way and I didn’t find time to finish it. Later, Dr Robin Darwall-Smith (Oxford), who’s been very kind to me and helpful with my thesis research, asked me again after he also became editor of History of Universities. And this time, I finally sat down and finished my review.
The eighteenth century is generally considered a dull period for universities. Jensen shows that we should not disregard this period. Many interesting changes were happening within academia at the time. He also sheds light on a region of Europe often overlooked in university history: the Nordic region.
I won’t go into detail on that here. Not now. If you do have access through your university library, please read my book review, as well as all of the other reviews and articles in this fabulous volume of History of Universities, edited by Mordechai Feingold and Robin Darwall-Smith. And pick up Jensen’s book, too!
The full bibliographical info for the reviewed work is: Mikkel Munthe Jensen, Patriotism and Reform in Nordic Universities during the Long Eighteenth Century. (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023), pp. 416.
The review can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197908402.003.0012
This January, I attended a wonderful university history conference in Limerick, Ireland. Organised by Professor Richard Kirwan and Dr Wouter Kreuze at the University of Limerick, along with a team of graduate students. The conference concerned university courts and jurisdiction in early modern Europe.
The conference came out of Kirwan’s Malcontents project, which focuses on:
“the nature and experience of marginality in the universities of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period. The project explores how academic communities and ruling authorities defined and responded to deviance in university contexts. The project themes are investigated across three work packages on religious non-conformity, social delinquency in the professoriate, and student ritual respectively. The project thus interrogates the importance of the identification and suppression of deviance in the substantiation of order in the early modern university and beyond.” (from the project website).
The project’s funded by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland.
Attending the conference was a great pleasure. It’s not every day that you get to meet fellow historians who specialise in university history. I am also happy that my paper “Nocturnal Activities: Contesting University Discipline in Eighteenth Century Oxford and Copenhagen” (and yes, that is a nod to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) was very well-received!
We modern-day people are used to a single unified jurisdiction, but that was not the case in early modern Europe. The jurisdiction you came under depended heavily on who you were (social position, profession, geographical position, confession, etc.) as well as the nature of your crime. Most early modern universities had jurisdiction over their own members, their academic citizens. This citizenry included not only students and professors but also university book printers, officers, and servants, among others. If you broke the rules—depending on the severity of your rule-breaking—you might find yourself in the university court. Who this court consisted of and where it met varied from university to university, and in some places, other authorities were involved (such as external clergy, town representatives, and so on). For the most part, the university court consisted of the professoriate and the university’s head.
In two days, we navigated the complex histories of university courts, legal proceedings, disciplinary regimes, student deviance, and the difficulties of academic households and protecting (or trying to) your own. The following is merely a few highlights: Kreuze gave an important paper on document typologies in early modern German university courts.
Ken Ird (Tartu) gave an interesting paper on the University of Tartu, which changed hands from being a European university founded by Gustav II Adolf of Sweden in 1632 to becoming part of tsarist Russia. It was the only traditional European (German) university in the Russian Empire. Ird also showed us the old student prison in Tartu.
Colin Donnelly (Oxford) discussed Gottlieb Spitzel’s (a seventeenth-century Protestant theologian and polymath in Augsburg) views on morality and knowledge. His talk centred on academic virtue and vice in the context of religious confessionalism.
Alan Ross (Vienna) spoke about ‘school courts’ and disciplinary regimes in the Holy Roman Empire. Ross brought up a case of pupils from a Protestant grammar school getting into brawls with the Catholic and Jesuit pupils. There was also a case of pupils crucifying a frog, burying the frog outside a professor’s house, then digging the frog up, and burying it in the Catholic graveyard.
Kirwan discussed Koenigsberg professor Caspar Perband and the events of 1592–1596, when Perband was stripped of his academic title and post, reinstated by ducal order, then dismissed from the university and exiled from Prussia. Perband famously stabbed one of his students, and while his colleagues were prepared to excuse him, the authorities grew concerned with his behaviour (he was also a poor administrator and a drunkard).
Mari Välimäki (Turku) presented a paper on academic families in early modern Sweden, focusing on a case of a student’s fornication with a servant girl. The student was the son of a university professor. Family ties and biases saw many professors excuse themselves from overseeing this court case.
I also really enjoyed Professor Dr Marian Füssel’s (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) keynote on student deviant practices in the Holy Roman Empire. And I was happy to finally meet Professor Kirwan in person (having previously corresponded via email). There are not that many historians focused on Nordic universities, therefore I am especially happy to have gotten to know Dr Mari Välimäki.
This post is an excerpt from my Substack. To read the full blog post, go to leifhammer.substack.com
My review of Johan Östling’s book Kunskapens stora hus: Huvudlinjer i universitetets historia (2024) was just published in the English Historical Review on the 3rd of December 2025. Östling’s is a wonderful and concise book on university history
The book review can be read here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceaf210 (Unfortunately, as this is a book review, there is no open access).
I have recently selected the photos and written the captions for the Berlevågkalenderen for 2026. This is a historical calendar published by the Berlevåg Harbour Museum. It’s goal, as I see it, is to disseminate different aspects of the local history. The calendar’s been published since the 90s (to my knowledge) and so it’s an honour to have been behind the entire production.
Selecting the images was a lengthy process. The photo archive database at my museum has some 5,000 objects —and that’s excluding the ones that have yet to be registered. Writing the captions involved using both the information already registered in the database (based on what informant’s could tell my predecessors about the photos) and retrieving new information from informants or by doing archival research. In my case, the digitised archive of Norwegian newspapers on the National Library’s website was invaluable.
Working on this has been a wonderful experience. It’s given us a chance to improve our database with new information and in some cases correcting erronous information —usually pertaining to dates. It’s also a wonderful way of getting glimpses into easily overlooked facets and pockets of local history, and to tie that history to both regional, national, and global ones.
The entries in the calendar range from a brutal murder in the 1890s to the opening of the public swimming pool in 1962; from an émigré to America in the early 1900s to a photo of my grandmother in a wintery landscape outside a house she bought, taken around 1990. Together the images tell stories of travel in its multiple meanings.
If anyone of my readers want to purchase the calendar for 190 NOK (around $19 or £15), plus shipping, feel free to email: post@berlevagmuseum.no.
Many thanks to Rudi Grafisk for the graphic design and Kraft Digitalprint for printing the calendars. Speaking to informants would have been impossible without the generous help of the local history society, who also looked through the proposed images and commented on them.
This blog post has also appeared on my Substack.
I am pleased to announce that I have finished the online course Introducing Mapping, Spatial Data and GIS from the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford, which ran from 23 April to 4 July 2025.
The course has allowed me to explore ideas and uncertainties that underpin the creation and use of spatial data and maps. I have explored the GIS software QGIS and produced my own georeferenced historical map.
I decided to join the course because I want to create my own maps for my DPhil thesis but I also look forward to delving deeper into using GIS in the future — both for my own work as a historian and museum head.
Going forwards —although I’m an early modernist at heart— I expect to be doing a lot more oral history. It’s exciting to be collecting data in this way. As a historian focused on a period where the people who lived during that period are long dead (or, who knows, perhaps there are some immortal vampires out there) you’re mostly confined to what the material in archives and museums can tell. There’s something refreshing about the concept of actually interviewing living, breathing people to collect their recollections —their lived experience. There’s also something terrifying about it.
I’ve done a few oral history interviews in the past, but with going into museum work, I’ll have to do a lot more of them. I face that prospect with trepidation and yet I think it’s very important. There are voices out there that will disappear, and these voices can fill in the gaps in missing histories that I think deserve to be preserved and circulated. We know that past people’s mental worlds were different. How we perceive ourselves and the world around us is temporal, spatial, and ephemeral. Smaller museums tend to focus on particular aspects of a place’s history and there’s nothing wrong with that. The reasons for that are many, no doubt Salem’s witch trials sell tickets. No doubt the industrialisation of Manchester is important to local people in Manchester because it informs their self-understanding in some way. Humans use history in various ways, to various effects, and for various reasons. History is important to us whether we realise it or not. For my hometown, the second world war —when it was occupied by the Nazis— is one of those key periods that will always stand out in the collective memory —and for the collective identity— of the place.
There is nothing wrong with keeping the memories and histories of the second world war alive at the museum. That is important, but we must not let it obfuscate other histories or let it lead us to overlook them. I think it is easy to do just that. One reason —a reason I often think of— is how we take some knowledges for granted. To give you one example, let’s say an American said to a non-American that they received a scary letter from the IRS. If the American offers no further explanation, they are assuming that the non-American knows what the IRS is or what it stands for. We all do this, in our daily lives. I bandy about abbreviations and facts about university history that presume that presume that the non-specialist already has a level of familiarity they may not have. Luckily, people ask when they do not know. I think the same goes for when we select what to save for posterity. This is not just true of doing oral history interviews, we see it all the time in the archives. There’s a discrepancy between what people thought was worth putting down on paper and what we —hundreds of years later— would really like to know. Some things are so blatantly obvious to us in the moment that we do not think to describe it to the outsider or even to assume that it would need explaining.
For oral history interviews this means teasing out what needs explaining. I think some important cases would be crafts (håndverk) and housework. If we look at preserved material culture in a small-town museum, we might know enough to label objects, but we don’t always know exactly how they were used, what they were used for, when they were used, who they were used by, or whether this was something everyone had or just a select few. For some objects, all these aspects may have been obvious then, but are they now? Look at the ‘save icon’, I’m old enough to know that that’s a floppy disk, but young people today can’t be expected to have seen a floppy disk or to know the what-when-who-how and if everybody with a computer had them or perhaps it was only used by corporations. If you’re not convinced, consider this. If I told you to write the word ‘hello’ in uppercase letters instead of lowercase letters (as I just did) do you know where ‘upper and lower case’ comes from? No? They come from printing. To assemble type for printing, printers had a set up with a case full of the uppercase versions of letters and another case with the lowercase letters; as you might guess, one case was above the other.
But it’s not just limited to cases like ‘how did fishermen use this particular hook and why did they stop’, it’s also related to understanding how people perceived the world around them. When my dad was sixteen years old, in 1960, he took a job on a ship transporting jet fuel around the world. He’s told me that was the thing to do back then, it was either that or going into fishing. There was no concept —in that time or place— of going off to university. When I was sixteen, the thing to do was to go to upper secondary school, I wouldn’t even know how to get a job on a ship like that if I wanted to. What we are dealing with here are different mental worlds; not only was the world actually different, but how one understood it was different. My dad’s perceptions have of course changed with time —indeed, the world’s changed massively seen he was born in the burnt down ruins of my hometown— and that is another issue with doing oral history. How we remember things are different from how they were. If we’re looking for unmediated, unfiltered factual data about the past we are out of luck unless we can corroborate that with other information. Memory is a difficult thing. That said, memory has an important place, and memories of how things were are —in and of themselves— crucial.
That brings me to the massive hurdle with oral history. As if deciding, as the ‘collector’, what is worth preserving isn’t pressuring enough, there is another difficulty. How do you get people to talk about the past and how do you make sure you can use it? What I mean is that it is difficult to know if you’re asking the right questions. Sure, you might get someone to talk about what their household looked like in the 1960s in a small town but are you asking detailed enough questions. Or will you sit there months later realising you forgot to ask how many rooms were in the house, whether they shared with another family. Or perhaps you realise they might not have been representative because they were the priest’s daughter and where socio-economically likely better off than most other families. I don’t expect there to be a right answer to that, I expect oral history to be an art; by doing it you learn to ask the right questions to the right level of detail.
The second issue is how do make sure you can use your oral history interviews? You need the participant’s consent for you to not only record the interview but to store it and use it for historical scholarship —be that museum exhibitions or publications. What I have found is that older people are worried about giving you that consent. They don’t want to be misconstrued. They feel a pressure to get things right and are worried that they misremember facts and that others might get mad with them for having ‘lied’ (in their view). There’s no easy solution to this other than to try and explain that even if they’re factually wrong about something, how they perceive or remember the past is more important than an error. More importantly, without their recollections, lived experience could go lost. Especially lived experience that I think is equally as important to preserve as the lived experiences of the second world war.
And that is why, although I’m terrified and see many difficulties with doing oral history, I think oral history is worth doing.
This blog post also appeared on my Substack. To get email alerts when I write something, join my Substack here.
I will be joining the Museums for Coastal Heritage and Reconstruction in Finnmark, Norway, as head of one of their six museums.
From late June 2025, I will be taking over the role as Museum Department Head for one of the six museums in the group Museums for Coastal Heritage and Reconstruction in Finnmark (Museene for kystkultur og gjenreising i Finnmark), also part of the larger consortium Museums of the Norwegian Coastal Administration (Kystverkmusea).
I look forward to taking on this role and to continuing the great work my predecessor did in fascilitating the museum’s position as a key cultural institution in the local community. I look forward to working with local history and to expanding the museum’s collections to include more recent history and to placing that local history in a regional, national, and international context. Together with the group, and its head of research, I hope to work together on research projects and look to collaborate with other museums and research groups in the Nordic countries.
There are many overlooked facets in the Finnmark region’s fascinating history that I think it is time to explore. In these uncertain times, I think local communities are a corner stone, and knowing one’s local history and how people in the past —in that paticular space— have responded to challenges and persevered is more important than ever and a source of inspiration and meaning.
With my DPhil slowly nearing its end (I look to submit in the coming months), I cannot wait for this next chapter. Of course, I will be keeping you all posted about what happens.
I have a new magazine article out, all about my archival visit to Denmark in 2024. The article is published in the Norwegian Historical Association’s members’ magazine Historikeren 1 (2025).
This Friday, at 10am (GMT) online, I’ll be chairing a seminar on ‘Environmental History’ for the Oxford Scandinavian Studies Network. We have two fantastic speakers ligned up:
Wanda Marcussen (Oslo): Violent Storms and Disappearing Fish: Climate Anomalies and the Coastal Landscape as Factors in the North Norwegian Witch Trials of the 17th Century
Christian Drury (Durham): Seeing Ice, Writing Ice: Glacier Tourism in Norway, 1850-1940
If you’re interested in tuning in, email scandinavianstudies@torch.ox.ac.uk for the Zoom link!
The Oxford Scandinavian Studies Network is a TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) Student Network at the University of Oxford. I am one of the co-founders and chairs. You can read more about us here.