Christoffer Basse Eriksen
HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE
Christoffer Basse Eriksen

About:
From natural objects to knowledge

I am a historian of science and medicine with a deep fascination of natural history and its sub-disciplines as they were pursued in the period between 1600 and 1850. I am interested in the various ways in which natural objects – flowers, seeds, salts, insects – have been turned into knowledge, and why. My research spans from studies of mechanical philosophies to hand-coloured herbals, and from preparation of specimens to the design of botanical gardens.

I am postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Science Studies, Aarhus University supported by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation. Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 2022 to 2024 and an at University of Cambridge from 2019-2022. I received my PhD in history of ideas from Aarhus University in 2018.

Christoffer Basse Eriksen

Robert John Thornton, The Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature: The Pontic Rhododendron (1799-1807), courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.

I am currently pursuing two research projects. The first, Scaling Science: Microscopes, Mechanism, and Generation in the Early Royal Society, is a book project on the early uses of microscopes and the invention of a new science of scale. Here, I study how anatomists and botanists turned the generation of bodies into something that could be studied through lenses. The second, Orchard Laboratory: Beekeeping, Plant Breeding, and the Enlightenment Discovery of Insect Pollination, takes a new look at the development of plant-insect relationships during the Enlightenment, and the emergence of the ecological thought.

Read ­more about my research and publications 

I currently live in Aarhus. I am sometimes on bluesky as @cberiksen. You can find my university website here.

And if you want to get in touch, you are very welcome to write an email: christofferbasse@gmail.com or cbe@css.au.dk.