Linnea RipenbergPhD student

Teaching

I teach on courses at the basic level and supvervise essays.

Doctoral thesis

In my PhD dissertation, i study how Africans and blackness was represented, percieved and communicated in seventeenth century Northern Europe. The main purpose is to understand how racial ideas that developed in this part of Europe, and how raciality spread beyond the main slave trading nations. I study material from baroque court festivals, primarily public ones, where Africans, among other groups, were represented in theatrical spectacles, mainly by European court members in blackface. The concepts of race and racism and the principles and functions of court festivals are diskussed in the study, in order to build an accurate understanding for the phenomenon in its historical context.

I study not only textual sources but also images and artefacts from these events. The purpose of this is to contribute to a historiography of race that includes a wider range of sources and objetcs of study than intellectual history traditionally has done.