Jonas Gerlings

I am an intellectual historian specialising in the long eighteenth century, with a particular interest in the Baltic Sea region and its global context. Through my research, I have developed extensive knowledge of Immanuel Kant, his local environment in Königsberg and the surrounding Baltic provinces and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I have also participated in a project examining the global circulation of Linnaean science and organised a project investigating intellectual exchanges between Geneva and the Nordic countries. I am currently part of the ERC project led by Ere Nokkala, “De-centring Eighteenth-Century Political Economy: Rethinking Growth, Wealth, and Welfare in the Swedish Empire” at the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä. As my mother is Finnish, coming to Jyväskylä feels very familiar.

Since defending my PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in 2017, I have held positions at the University of Copenhagen (2016–2017) and the University of Göttingen (2021–2024). From 2022 to 2023, I was a visiting senior research associate at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, and I have also been a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh, Uppsala University, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Studies, the Danish Academy in Rome, and the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies in Halle. While at the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Studies, I met Ere Nokkala, and I have contributed to several of his books since then. Together, we also edited the volume The Process of Enlightenment: Essays by and inspired by Hans Erich Bödeker (2024).

My work currently focuses on two complementary strands of thought. The first examines abolitionist thought as a wider European phenomenon. I focus particularly on the German-speaking area, Denmark, and the Baltic provinces. The second strand examines notions of natural law and human rights from the perspective of marginalised figures. In this context, I have studied the Italian writer Carlantonio Pilati, who criticised natural law from the perspective of an African, as well as Anton Wilhelm Amo, a native African who defended a disputation on the legal status of Africans in Europe at the University of Halle in 1729. In Jyväskylä, I am continuing this line of research in my work on Charlotta Hedwig Nordenflycht. Nordenflycht was a Swedish poet who, in 1761, wrote a defence of women in response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although Nordenflycht was celebrated as a poet, it is only recently that her significance as a political writer and philosopher has gained wider recognition. She was the first person to use the term “women’s rights” in Swedish, decades before it gained wider recognition in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges in the 1790s. My work here in Jyväskylä examines how Nordenflycht introduces and uses the concept of women’s rights at a time when human rights had not yet achieved the same normative effect.