Dr Christa Lundberg

Dr Christa Lundberg specialises in the history of early modern universities, books, and knowledge. She is currently writing a book about how scholarly publishing transformed the academic study of theology in early sixteenth-century Paris. Her next research project deals with the intellectual history of plagiarism. How did early modern scholars define and theorise plagiarism? What strategies did they use to discourage unacknowledged borrowings? Exploring such questions, the study will illuminate how actors aiming to advance knowledge, distribute credit for past and contemporary inventions, and safeguard intellectual credibility contributed to creating new norms for authorial ethics and etiquette.

Dame Jean Thomas Junior Research Fellow in History

Christa gained a bachelor's degree in liberal arts and the history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She next travelled widely, studying book history at ENSSIB in Lyon, cultural and intellectual history at the Warburg Institute, and post-classical Latin at UCLA. She arrived in Cambridge in 2017 to pursue a PhD funded by AHRC and Trinity College, with additional support from the Society for the Study of French History and the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. The resulting thesis is entitled Apostolic Theology and Humanism at the University of Paris, 1490–1520.

‘Epistemic hierarchies and historical actors: Reframing Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples,’ in Knowledge Actors: Revisiting Agency in the History of Knowledge, edited by Johan Östling, David Larsson Heidenblad & Anna Nilsson Hammar, 67–81. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2023. 

‘Humanists and Scholastics in early sixteenth-century Paris: New Sources from the Faculty of Theology,’ Intellectual History Review, published online ahead of print in December 2022.  

‘The Making of a Philosopher: The Contemplative Letters of Charles de Bovelles,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 82.2, 2021: 185–205.

2022