Literature professor to head ambitious research centre

The upcoming Nordic Humanities Center for Challenge-Based Inquiry has been established as an innovative collaboration between the faculties of humanities at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Southern Denmark.
Over the next six years, the centre will contribute nuances, perspectives, new understandings and opportunities for action in the face of major societal challenges such as the climate crisis, pandemics, war, inequality and artificial intelligence. The research centre came to be following a grant of DKK 60 million from the A.P. Moller Relief Foundation. 

After a thorough recruitment process, it has now been decided that Professor of Literature and recipient of the Elite Research Prize, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, will head the centre. As Head of Centre, Anders Engberg-Pedersen will create a framework for new collaborations between a wide range of researchers within the humanities from different academic environments across the two universities.

- We are delighted to welcome Professor Anders Engberg-Pedersen as Head of Centre. The Nordic Humanities Center for Challenge-Based Inquiry is funded by a very generous grant from The A.P. Møller Relief Foundation, which makes it possible to carry out a large number of cross-disciplinary humanities studies in the years to come, which from a Nordic perspective can shift our understanding of the big questions.
- It requires deep academic insight, an eye for the identity and opportunities of humanities research and a special management talent to create a framework that can fulfil ambitions of this magnitude, and Anders possesses these qualifications, say Deans Simon Møberg Torp and Kirsten Busch Nielsen on behalf of the faculties of humanities at SDU and UCPH.

They continue:
- With the centre, SDU and UCPH have been given the opportunity to exploit the great potential that exists in the many academic environments within the humanities into a single centre and focus efforts on interdisciplinary projects. With his own weight as a researcher and his eye for the role of humanities research in society, he has the crucial prerequisites to build and lead a centre of precisely this nature.

Profile

Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Language, Culture, History and Communication, Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study and affiliated with the Center for War Studies at SDU, where he heads the War and Culture Research Group.
He holds a PhD with a double degree from Harvard University and Humboldt Universität and was Carlsberg Foundation Distinguished Associate Professor prior to his appointment as professor in 2019. In 2021, he received the Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s Elite Research Prize for his research into the knowledge and cultural history of war.
- I’m really looking forward to getting started. The centre will establish the framework for a new and very exciting way of conducting humanistic research. It will connect two faculties of humanities and allow researchers to join forces for one year at a time on a common theme related to a significant societal issue.
It will be a kind of humanities think tank that will connect outstanding researchers across the country to provide us with humanistic perspectives on current national and global societal challenges,’ says Anders Engberg-Pedersen.

Contact

Professor Anders Engberg-Pedersen, tel. (+45) 53 44 07 71, engberg@sdu.dk