Mette Birkedal Bruun

Short presentation

Born 1 November 1967

From 15 Sept. 2017: Leader of The Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies

From 1 July 2017: Professor of Church History

2017: dr.theol.: The Unfamiliar Familiar: Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626-1700) between Withdrawal and Engagement

From Sept. 2016: Chair of the Research Board and Faculty of Theology representative in University of Copenhagen Research and Innovation Board (KUFIR)

Feb. 2013-March 2017: Director of the research project: SOLITUDES: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long Seventeenth Century (ERC)

From 15 Dec. 2009: Professor at the Department of Church History

2003-9: Research fellow at The Danish Research Council's centre of excellence Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals.

2001-2: post-doc. grant from the Danish Research Council of the Humanities (SHF).

2000: PhD: Bernard of Clairvaux's Mapping of Spiritual Topography

1997-8: Visiting fellow, Clare Hall College, Cambridge University.

1996-9: PhD student at the Department of Church History, University of Aarhus.

1995: MA in theology from the University of Copenhagen.

2019: Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters

2012: Årets Harald: The University of Copenhagen teaching prize

Primary fields of research

Early modern devotion in France, Germany and England

Monasticism

Current research

My primary research concerns notions of privacy in the period 1500-1800 seen from church historical and interdisciplinary perspectives.

I am working on a monograph based on my doktordisputats: The Unfamiliar Familiar: Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626-1700) between Withdrawal and Engagement (defended June 2017) regarding Armand-Jean de Rancé's Cistercian reform at La Trappe in the last half of the seventeenth century. I have studied the abbot in his religious, cultural and social context and on the interaction between religious and aesthetic discourses in the world of Louis XIV.

I am working on publications related to the research project Solitudes: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long Seventeenth Century, financed by the ERC

Fields of interest

The relation between theology, literature and history
Anthropologies
Hermeneutics
Representation