Erik Opsahl is a professor of medieval history at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies and head of the Centre for Medieval Studies. His primary field of research is the European and especially the Nordic late medieval period, from the 13th to the 17th century. A central topic in his research is political-institutional history, focusing on state-building, political culture, aristocracy and other political elites, identities, and loyalties. Together with Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde, UiO, he co-leads a project about the Norwegian law code of 1274 and its significance in Norwegian society through the centuries until it was replaced by Christian V's Norwegian code of 1687, including a year's stay at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS). He participated in the interdisciplinary project MEDHEAL600, funded by the Research Council Norway, which investigated living and health conditions in Trondheim in the period between the years 1000-1600 and participates now, among other things, in a project about Nordic history writing with particular focus on the Nordic saint-kings in the late medieval and early modern period. He is in the steering group for Norsk borgsenter at the Slottsfjell Museum in Tønsberg, where he works on Norwegian castle building and military in the Middle Ages. He is part of the research group "Den uægte Lodning" which investigates the late medieval Norwegian period with a specific focus on political groups and social networks.                    

David Brégaint is a professor in medieval history at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. His research interests include ideology, communications and medieval culture, political culture in particular. His book project The court of the Norwegian kings in the high Middle Ages: A physical, political and cultural space examines the court of the Norwegian kings ca. 1150-1400, its economy, as a center of government and of culture. He is also working on articles examining different aspects of the Norwegian Middle Ages: “From blood to virtue. The Making of a New Aristocracy in Thirteenth Century Norway” focuses on the representations of the aristocracy of birth contra that by virtue in the King’s Mirror and Law of the Hird, on the critics against the former and how the latter was praised. The article “The Norwegian Civil Wars invented. Questioning a periodization and a chrononym” examines how the period between 1130 and 1240 called the Norwegian Civil Wars has been perceived and portrayed in Norwegian scholarship from P.A Munch until today. He is also working on a French translation of the Law of the Hird, La loi de la Hird. Politique et culture à la cour du roi Magnus VI le législateur.

Ivar Berg is a professor in Scandinavian linguistics at the Department of Language and Literature. He works with Scandinavian language history from the oldest times to the present, with a main focus on  the (late) Middle Ages, both how the language system has changed and the interaction between language and society. His research includes topics such as linguistic practice at the see of Nidaros during the late Middle Ages and the time of Reformation, the change from Norwegian to Danish as the written language in Norway, and the relationship between Norwegian and the foreign languages Latin and Low German. He is generally interested in literacy in society, people’s relationship to writing and what writing was used for. 

Martin Callanan is an associate professor and program director for archaeology at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. He works on alpine snow patches and frozen cultural heritage in central Norway. In the research project with the Norwegian title Utvikling av lokale jaktteknologier i sen jernalder og middelalderen (c. 700-1400 e.Kr), he investigates changes in bow and later crossbow technologies in the period between the 8th and the 15th century, based on data from snow patches. Furthermore, the project analyses these changes against the background of overreaching political, military, and social processes and developments, and in the prolonging of this, broader questions such as economy and in particular the utilization of outfield resources in the iron age and the Middle Ages. In his project with the Norwegian title Sørsamisk arkeologi i jernalderen og middelalderen, the key objective is to investigate and develop an analytic and systematic overview over South Sami findings and localities in the region.    

Magne Njåstad

Magne Njåstad is a professor in late medieval and early modern history at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. In the project Complaints and Political Communication c. 1300-1650, he analyses written communication between the authorities, local communities, and individuals, to gain a clearer image of a political culture delimited by laws, literacy and collective norms. He has published a number of articles related to this project, and a monograph will be published in 2024/25. He contributes to a commented edition of the Norwegian law code, which will be published in 2024. He investigates Olav Haraldsson in early modern history writing, and a segment of the use of Norwegian medieval history during the autocratic period. His research interests also include local communities and elites in the late medieval Norwegian period. He is part of the research group “Den uægte Lodning”, which investigates the late medieval Norwegian period with a specific focus on political groups and social networks.           

Thea Selliaas Thorsen is a professor in classical studies at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. Her field of research includes Greek and Latin literature, and the reception history of classical literature. She is interested in Theodoricus’ De antiquitate regum norwagiensium (c. 1180), the work’s connections with the historia ecclesiastica tradition (Eusebius and Bede), its thematic and lexical echoes in Passio Olavi and the Olav officium Lux illuxit, and its reception history in Norway from the 19th century onwards, a period during which it seems to have been curiously neglected.     

Randi Bjørshol Wærdahl is a professor in medieval history at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. Her research focuses primarily on questions related to gender in the Middle Ages, more specifically women’s political and economic scope of action. Key issues in her research are women’s opportunities to participate in political activities, the significance of gender in the legal process, interaction between women from different social groups, common women’s economic rights and scope of action, and elite women’s interactions with bishops and dioceses. She also investigates the relationship between centre and periphery in the Norwegian kingdom before 1400, that is the relationship between the Norwegian royal power and the tax territories. She is head of the research group «Den uægte Lodning», which investigates the late medieval Norwegian period with a specific focus on political groups and social networks.

Jon Anders Risvaag is an associate professor of numismatics at the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History at the NTNU University Museum. His research interests include medieval and early modern numismatics and monetary history, urban history and archaeology in the medieval and early post-Reformation periods, and minting technology. He will research the history of Norwegian coinage and money in the period 1320-1650, including perspectives such as the city and the countryside as monetary arenas, foreign coinage in Norway, the coinage policy of the whole state and consequences for Norway, the role of the church/archsee, and coinage in religious contexts. 

Axel Christophersen is a professor in historical archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History at the NTNU University Museum. He has a particular research focus on medieval urban development and pre-industrial urbanization with emphasis on identity formation, urbanity and social organization and interaction. His research interests also include health and welfare development in urban environments 1000-1600, climate and environmental development with emphasis on the relationship (urban) ecological processes and man's place in these, as well as the process of state formation in the Nordic countries with emphasis on the relationship between the development of regal domination and the process of Christianization and the establishment of church organization. He has also researched trade and the development of crafts from the Viking Age through the Middle Ages.  

Roman Hankeln, professor of music history, is teaching at NTNU’s Institute of Music and the Institute of History and Classical Studies. Hankeln’s research focuses on medieval liturgical vocal music («Gregorian chant», «post-Gregorian chant»), its style and cultural-political context. Many of Hankeln's writings are centred on the medieval cult of saints in a pan-European perspective. Emphasis lies on the reflection of political ideology in chants for sainted rulers like St. Olaf, St. Knud, Charlemagne, empereror Henry II as well as soldier saints like St. Maurice and the Theban legion. Especially important in Hankeln’s work are editions of saints’ offices in the series HISTORIAE which are published by him, leading a team of experts on behalf of the International Musicological Society. Another branch of Hankeln’s activity addresses Gregorian chant at the transition to the early modern age. Here, Hankeln has published on late Latin chants (Cantiones), the musical practice in northern German nunneries, and the transition from catholic to protestant liturgy in Norway during the reformation era (Missale Nidrosiense and Breviarium Nidrosiense). Recently he is involved in the online cataloguing of medieval fragments at the Gunnerus-library in Trondheim. 

Kjersti Bruvoll is an associate professor at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. She is originally a Norse philologist and works on projects at the intersection of Norse philology and medieval history. In the project Literacy and written language competence in Norway in the 1500s, she explores the development of administrative and vernacular written language competence in the transition between medieval and early modern times in Norway. She also researches Norse literature, and what characterizes translated Norse literature compared to the original texts. 

Tom Lorenz is a PhD candidate at the Department of language and Literature. His PhD project consists in an interdisciplinary study to fragments of liturgical books written in Iceland in the Middle Ages. He holds a master's degree in Scandinavian Studies and German Philology from Kiel University, and his MA thesis investigated the vernacular adaptions of the Latin Evangelium Nicodemi in Iceland and Scandinavia. His research interests include material philology, fragment studies, stemmatology, digital humanities and medieval and early modern Northern Europe. 

Roe Fremstedal is a professor in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. His research interests include ethics and philosophy of religion, theological virtues (faith, hope, love), natural theology, the distinction between theology and philosophy, religious and moral conversion, Augustinian philosophy, especially eudaimonism, the concept of the highest good (summum bonum), the doctrine of original sin, and acedia.  

Margrete Syrstad Andås is an associate professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies. Her scholarly fields of interest include visual languages in periods of cultural transformation, and she has previously researched the Urnes style in the 11thC and other styles and visual vocabularies in the late Viking period as expressions of bilingualism/ multilingualism. Furthermore, her research interests include the development of religious landscapes and "urban religiosity". She has published on the development of a religious topography in Oslo and worked on the development of a distinct St Olav’s topography in the urban development at Nidarneset. Andås has also worked with liturgy and architecture, particularly on the ritual use of the liminal zone in-between sacred and profane, and the liturgical use of urban spaces. She has published several articles on Romanesque and Gothic style and iconography in Scandinavia and is currently working on a book about Trondheim Cathedral's (Nidaros Cathedral’s) architectural sculpture and its rituals as reflections of religious and political culture. Together with scholars form other universities and organizations, she has a research group which explores the decoration and construction of wooden churches in the North through a millennium.   

Rakel Igland Diesen is a former PhD student at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies (IHK), NTNU. She is a medieval historian with a particular interest in childhood history and Nordic medieval hagiography. Her dissertation from 2023, Looking for Children in Hagiography: Conceptions and representations of children in Nordic miracles and vitae from the 12th to the 15th century, is positioned within childhood history, intersecting with the fields of social history, cultural history, and the history of ideas. Its focus is on the medieval children who are found in a collection of texts about the native saints and their workings. The study’s combination of sources, historical period, and regional focus contributes to filling in a research gap in childhood history. 

Martin Veier-Olsen is a PhD candidate in history didactics at the Department of Teacher Education. He has a master’s degree from the Teacher Education Programme in history at NTNU. The master's thesis from 2017 examined Danish authorities' encounters with Norwegians and Norwegian conditions in the decades after the loss of self-sufficiency in 1537. The thesis was awarded HIFO's Fritt Ord grant the following year. In his PhD project, he researches how timelines can be used in schools to demonstrate an understanding of historical concepts and historical time. He is also a member of the research group Medieval Didactics (MIDDAK), which thematizes how teaching about the Middle Ages in primary and secondary education requires its own approaches with regard to historicization, problematization and didactization.

Susann Anett Pedersen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. She is a medieval historian with a particular interest in social and economic history. She is also interested in gender history and investigated women's economic agency in her doctoral thesis Choice and Consequence. Propertied Women's Economic Agency in Norway c. 1400-1550 (2021). In her postdoctoral project Credit and creditability – a new approach to Norwegian economic history c. 1250-1570, she explores credit’s economic and social role in medieval Norway. She is part of the research group “Den uægte Lodning”,  which investigates the late medieval Norwegian period with a specific focus on political groups and social networks.   

Per-Olav Broback Rasch is a Research Librarian in early modern history at NTNU University Library (Special Collections). He is currently researching the historian Gerhard Schøning's (1722-80) contribution to early Norwegian historical research. The research project is in collaboration with The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS), which Schøning co-founded in 1760. The research will be published in a book about Schøning during 2024. Other research interests include the cathedral chapter in Trondheim and the provenance of medieval sources at archives and libraries in Denmark-Norway. In collaboration with other researchers, he works on updating the metadata and provenance of the diploma and fragment collection at the Special Collections. 

Margrethe C. Stang is an associate professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies, and a medieval researcher specializing in Norwegian painting in the High Middle Ages. She researches representations of Olav Haraldsson in Germany in the late Middle Ages, and discusses the Nordic and Northern European representations of Olav in light of Olav's role as both a national and transnational saint and royal figure. Furthermore, she will shed light on Olav's role in the post-Reformation Denmark Norway, both in the individual parish church, where medieval statues of Olav were joined by the king's monogram over the choir screen, and in Copenhagen, where the king's Chamber of Antiquities collected objects and depictions related to St. Olav, and where the staging of royal power could also incorporate references to St. Olav. 

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Lasse Hodne is professor of art history at The Department of Art and Media Studies. He has particularly worked with Italian visual art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and from 2002 to 2006 was deputy director at the Norwegian Institute in Rome. His research has dealt with the relationship between art, philosophy, and theology, as well as issues related to iconography. Two of his books - Sponsus amat sponsam and The Virginity of the Virgin - are devoted to Marian iconography. In addition, he has studied the relationship between portrait art and facial perception, based on psychological and neuroscientific methods. The research on Renaissance portraits has partly been carried out within the framework of PoeticA – an international, EEA-supported project in neuroaesthetics. A third field of interest is the reception of art, particularly the interest in the Middle Ages in modern times and the flourishing of interest in ancient classical art in the Renaissance and Neoclassicism. The latter has been the starting point for (so far) six articles on the German art theorist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). 

Ingrid Ystgaard is an associate professor in archaeology at the Department of Historical and Classical Studies. She works with settlement, landscape exploitation and the relationship between man and the environment in the older and younger Iron Age. She led the excavation of seven farms from the Iron Age and the Middle Ages at Ørland Fighter Air Base. Based on this, she has contributed to national and international workshops, and co-edited the anthology Complexity and Dynamics - Settlement and landscape from the Bronze Age to the Renaissance in the Nordic Countries (1700 BC - AD 1600) which came out in 2023. Her research interests also include warfare in the older and younger Iron Ages, starting with rural castles, weapon graves and boathouse sites. 

Peter Sigurdson Lunga is associate professor in social studies (history) and teaches history, history didactics, scientific theory and method at the Master's programme of Primary and Lower Secondary Teacher. He has a PhD in medieval history from the University of Cambridge and is the leader of the research group MIDDAK - Medieval history didactics at the Department for Teacher Education. His research focuses on comparative history, legendary genealogies, and representations of the pre-Christian and classical past in medieval historical writing. In the research project Saamis and origin legends, Peter is working with ideas of Saami-Norwegian origins in Old Norse texts and genealogies. He is also involved in a project on drama and aesthetic learning processes in history education. 

Ulrika Mårtensson is professor of Religious studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious studies. Her research focuses on the early and medieval Islamic scientific disciplines, and their significance in contemporary contexts (including in Norway). The two specific areas she is concentrating on now and for the future are: (1) Islam’s sacred scripture The Qur’an, written in Arabic language. Focus is on possible relationships between the scripture’s 600’s context, with consideration also of the Arabs’ ancient history, and its theory contents, especially theories of natural law, social contract, language, and rhetoric. The main question is to what extent theories may reflect changes in agriculture and legal rights for farmworkers and peasants (of both genders). (2) The famous jurist, Qur’an commentator, and historian al-Tabari (d. 923) and the school of law he developed during his career in Baghdad. Focus is again on relations between societal context and theories, particularly al-Tabari’s human rights-thinking and peasants’ rights. In addition, al-Tabari’s jurisprudence, Qur’an commentary, and history provide important theories and analysis for the research on the Qur’an itself. 

Yuri Cowan is Professor of English Literature in the Department of Language and Literature. He works on the reception of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century, especially with its physical survivals in the form of books and textual and material culture. He has written on ballad anthologies and collecting in the English and Norwegian contexts, as well as on the relationship of William Morris and his contemporaries to the medieval book arts, history, and material culture. He is currently at work on a monograph, William Morris and Medieval Material Culture, and is an editor-in-chief of the journal Book History. 

Staffan Wahlgren

Staffan Wahlgren is a professor of classical philology at the Institute of historical and classical studies, with a specialty in ancient and Byzantine Greek. His research interests range from textual criticism and editorial technique to linguistic diachrony and methods borrowed from theoretical linguistics, digital humanities, and the like. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Free University of Berlin and a professor of Greek language and literature at Lund University, Sweden, and he has been a visiting scholar at several other universities, such as Cologne and Cambridge. He was a partner in the EU-funded framework-programme project on palimpsests (Discovering Europe's Hidden Heritage) and is also a partner in a digital-humanities undertaking at the Volkswagen-Stiftung. He is active in the discussion about formal vs. natural language in the Middle Ages, not least through the Postclassical Greek Network (https://postclassicalgreeknetwork.uni-koeln.de/), financed by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is active as an expert at the European Science Foundation and other funding bodies. Furthermore, he is interested in medieval cultures in their global context and has published several articles on Greek and Slavic cultural contact during the Middle Ages, and, in connection with this, he is preparing a project in collaboration with Slavists and Byzantinists at the universities of Cologne and Leuven. At present, he is preparing a grammar of Byzantine Greek with a database with morphological and syntactical analysis which, in part, is compiled through automatic parsing.