Press Room

Biography

Lyndal Roper (b. 1956) is a historian of early modern Europe. She grew up in Australia and did her first degree at the University of Melbourne, then went to Germany, studied at the University of Tübingen, and completed her doctorate at King’s College London, where she joined the London Feminist History Group. She has worked at King’s College London, Royal Holloway, University of London, where she set up the Bedford Centre for Women’s History with Amanda Vickery in 1999, and Balliol College Oxford. In 2011 she became Regius Professor of History at Oxford, the first woman to hold the 300 year old post.

Since girlhood in Australia, she has been fascinated by German history, and she has written on women and the Reformation, witchcraft, and sexuality in the sixteenth century. In 2016 she published a biography of the reformer Martin Luther and last year her history of the German Peasants’ War of 1524-26 appeared, Summer of Fire and Blood, which won the Cundill Prize. To write this book, she cycled or walked almost all the areas it took place, cycling over 600 km from Strasbourg to Konstanz.

Now she runs experimental workshops, ‘Moving History’, teaching critical and creative thinking in combination with physical exercise. She co-edited the journal Past & Present for over a decade and has been a member of History Workshop Journal collective for forty years. She has been involved in many campaigns around issues of women/gender and equality generally and helped establish two Chairs at the University of Oxford in Women’s History and in the History of Sexuality.

Quote from the Laureate

“I guess that over the course of my career, I’ve been trying to do history from below, that is, I wanted a history that would include the voices of ordinary people, of all kinds, colours and classes, and of women in particular. I wanted new historical narratives that were not about great men and giant events. And I wanted to get away from the kind of Foucauldian obsession with discourse, which – much as it has brought us by making us pay attention to language – has distorted our understanding of human agency, and what being human involves. Here I think my experience of being a mother made me realise how important what can’t be put Into words is, and how communication doesn’t always need language. And I wanted gender to be front and centre of the kind of history we write. I wanted to bring people’s bodily experiences into history, and I wanted to think about people’s unconscious motivations too. That’s why I was interested in Luther’s stout body – after all, the saintly are often thin, immune to fleshly pleasures; but Luther was anything but. And that’s why I wanted to understand emotions in an event like that of the German Peasants’ War of 1525, an event which has been unjustly forgotten for over a generation – and which had its 500th anniversary last year.  I was determined to write about the Bauernkrieg because I wanted a history that would ask what it was like to be part of a revolution, to do things you had never dreamed of doing. That year made me think again about memory and history and about the differences between the former East and the former West, the division which has shaped my generation’s experience, and the interpretation of which is emblematic of the differences between the former two Germanies.”

Links

• The Holberg Committee Citation
• Personal page at University of Oxford
• Video clip: Lyndal Roper responds to the news
• Interview with Lyndal Roper: Holberg Prize Talks

Expert Contact

Gunnar Winsnes Knutsen

Professor of History, Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion

University of Bergen

Tel: 47 55 58 31 58

Email: gunnar.knutsen@uib.no

Biography

Majse Lind (b. 1989) earned her PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Northeastern University in Boston, USA, and at the University of Florida, USA, before joining Aalborg University, where she has been Associate Professor of Psychology since August 2025.

Her research centers on what William James famously described as psychology’s most puzzling puzzle: identity. She investigates identity at the intersection of personality development and personality pathology, with a particular focus on narrative identity. Dr. Lind is Director of the IN:DEPTH Lab (IdeNtity, DEvelopment, and Personality paTHology), where she leads several ambitious research projects funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and the Carlsberg Foundation.

She is also Co-Director of the AI:MIND Lab together with Niels Van Berkel from Computer Science, where they integrate artificial intelligence methods to detect and intervene on early markers of personality pathology.

Dr. Lind serves as President-Elect of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD) and chairs its Internationalization Committee. In these roles, she works to strengthen global collaboration in personality pathology research, with particular attention to supporting scholars in underrepresented regions.

She has published international books and peer-reviewed articles in leading journals in her field and has received national and international awards for her research on personality disorders and narrative identity. In addition, she is actively engaged in editorial and professional service, including roles as Associate Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy (2027–), Consulting Editor of the European Journal of Personality (2026–), and Editorial Board Member of Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment (2022–present).

Quote from the Laureate

“My research examines personality development and the processes through which it becomes disturbed. I focus particularly on narrative identity, the internalized and evolving life story individuals construct to make sense of who they are and how they have developed over time.

From a developmental perspective, I have identified distinct patterns of narrative identity construction in individuals with personality disorders and demonstrated that these patterns are already observable in early adolescence among youth exhibiting personality disorder features. Based on this work, I argue that narrative identity should be considered a potential early indicator of emerging personality pathology.

Therapeutically, my research shows that narrative agency, defined as the extent to which individuals experience themselves as active agents in their own life stories, can be strengthened through psychotherapy. I propose that enhancing narrative agency should be conceptualized and implemented as a core mechanism of therapeutic change.

At the diagnostic and conceptual level, I have published several papers outlining how, when, and why disturbances in narrative identity should be recognized as a central yet currently underemphasized component of personality disorder classification systems.

Methodologically, I employ a multi-methods approach to studying identity and narrative identity. In collaboration with researchers from computer science, I am currently exploring the use of artificial intelligence to identify early markers of personality pathology in youth.”

Press Photos

Links

• Nils Klim Committee Citation
• Profile Page at Aalborg University

Expert Contact

Per-Einar Binder

Professor of Clinical Psychology, Department of Clinical and Biological Psychology

University of Bergen

Tel: 47 55 58 90 90

Email: per.binder@uib.no