Researchers
Hampus Östh Gustafsson
Tobias Dalberg
Audrey Harroche
François van Schalkwyk
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt
Backgrounds
Hampus Östh Gustafsson
(PI, uppsala University)
Intellectual historian at Uppsala University with an interdisciplinary focus on the societal legitimacy of knowledge, crisis discourses, and the history of research funding. Co-editor of The Humanities and the Modern Politics of Knowledge (2022) and contributor to journals such as Higher Education, History of Humanities, and Minerva. Formerly affiliated with institutions including the University of Oxford, University of Amsterdam, and Lund University. Co-leads research on Sweden’s SSH funding history, career trajectories, and early career precarity.
Tobias Dalberg
(Uppsala UNIVERSITY)
Senior Lecturer in sociology of education at Uppsala University and former postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Specialises in educational pathways, disciplinary evolution, and the sociology of science, with a focus on Sweden’s higher education history from 1945–2020. Collaborates with Östh Gustafsson on case studies of Sweden’s SSH funding and career trajectories. Uses long-term prosopographic data to analyse career patterns and structural changes in academia.
Audrey Harroche
(OXFORD BROOKS BUSINESS SCHOOL/SCIENCES PO)
Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for Sociology of Organisations. Studies excellence policies in France and the UK, focusing on academic inequalities and working conditions. Authored a monograph on France’s Excellence Initiatives and is researching the UK’s Research Excellence Framework with attention to diversity, equality, and inclusion. Her work informs comparative analyses of funding practices and their impact on early career researchers.
François van Schalkwyk
(Stellenbosch university)
Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University and Fellow at Arizona State University’s CORD. Current research interests include competition and cooperation in higher education, academic precarity, scholarly publishing and science-society relations. Author of Research Universities in Africa and over 30 research articles, and associate- editor of Learned Publishing. Contributes global perspectives to the collaboration, examining Europe–Africa funding connections and graduate employment trends in South Africa.
Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt
(ghent university)
Cultural historian and sociologist, Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent and Utrecht University, with a PhD from Ghent and an MA from The University of Chicago. Researches twentieth-century historiography, academic evaluation, and funding history, with comparative studies on European regimes since the 1970s. Highlights the shift from needs-based, collaborative funding to competitive, performance-based systems. Currently launching a project on humanities scholarship funding in international associations and networks.