The LUMEN centre turned five January 1^st. The Pandemic is not gone, but LUMEN has managed to keep its activity going, as the Report shows.

As 2022 begins we are again struck by restrictions also affecting most of 2021 even though there were a few month of almost normal conditions in the autumn. Members of the centre have even been to conferences in Germany and Norway.

The postponed conference “Reformation and Everyday Life” - the closing international conference for the collective research project “Lutheranism and Danish societal development” had to go online. Nevertheless, very good keynotes by Lee Palmer Wandel, Thomas Kaufmann, Bridget Heal, Martin Berntson and Kirsi Stjerna, and plenty of fine papers made the conference as good as it could possibly be under the actual conditions.

Several works from various projects came out in 2021. Most attendance received the Danish “popular” volume Pligt og omsorg – velfærdsstatens lutherske rødder (Duty and care – the Lutheran roots of the welfare state). In this, the research from the collective project on “Lutheranism and Danish societal development” was combined to one single argument following the impact of Lutheran social imaginaries through Danish history from the reformation to the present day.

A year ago, we could share the news that Nina Koefoed had received a grant for research infrastructure from the Carlsberg Foundation. After finishing this pilot project, Nina Koefoed and her student crew succeeded in training an AI model on the Transkribus platform to read 18. c. handwriting with 95% accuracy. The model is now made public on Transkribus to the benefit of students and researchers working with Danish handwritten 18th century sources.

By the end of the year, former PhD-student in LUMEN, Mattias Skat Sommer, was appointed assistant professor in Church History and welcomed as member of the LUMEN steering committee.

To see the report, please click here.