Dr Vincent Roy-Di Piazza

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Humanities Division

Arts and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow 2023

vincent.roy-dipiazza@humanities.ox.ac.uk

I am an early modern historian of science and religion, political economy, and the Northern World. I recently obtained my DPhil at Oxford (2022) in history of science, medicine, economic and social history.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Coucil. I am also the Hagströmer Fellow 2023 at the Hagströmer Library of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Research Interests

• Early modern history of science, religion, and political economy

• History of the body, slavery, and race-making in the Enlightenment

• Global Northern European history

My peer-reviewed publications explore notions of African superiority, colonization and slavery (Intellectual History Review, 2023) Swedish climactic science in times of warfare (Etudes Germaniques, 2021) and the links between the afterlife, travelogues and extra-terrestrialism in the early modern period (Annals of Science, 2020).

I am a specialist of the life and works of Swedish parliamentarian, philosopher and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) and have a broader interest in currents related to his ideas and posterity (millenarianism, abolitionism, environmental thought).

My doctoral thesis, titled 'Homo Maximus: Emanuel Swedenborg and the interaction of soul and body' provided a new intellectual biography of Swedenborg centred on his lifelong interest for the soul-body problem within the debate's scientific, religious and socio-political contexts. My DPhil was fully funded by the British research council (AHRC-DTP), the Gilbert Ryle scholarship at Linacre College, and the inaugural SDS scholarship by the Swedenborg Society in London during four years (2018-2022).

Contact

You can find out more about my research on my Personal webpage and reach out via Twitter: @RoyDiPiazza

Enslaved by African angels: Swedenborg on African superiority, evangelization, and slavery (April 2023)

This article provides the first extensive study of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) views on Africans and slavery. Although significant scholarship has been devoted to Swedenborg’s influence on the British abolitionist movement in the 1780s-1790s, comparably little has been written on the ideas and context which inspired this influence in the first place. This article explores Swedenborg’s ties to networks and debates about African evangelization, colonization, and slavery during the neglected period of the Swedish Age of Liberty (1719–1772).

'Ghosts from other planets': plurality of worlds, afterlife and satire in Emanuel Swedenborg’s De Telluribus in mundo nostro solari (1758) (September 2020)

In 1758 in London, Swedish natural philosopher and mystic theologian Emanuel Swedenborg published De Telluribus in Mundo nostro Solari (Earths in our solar system), a treatise on the plurality of worlds and life on other planets. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these topics formed a heterogenous literary genre which encompassed theology, astronomy, philosophy and satire. In De Telluribus, Swedenborg made detailed claims of communication with extraterrestrial spirits in the afterlife, through which he sought to spread his theology to new audiences.

Dr Vincent Roy-Di Piazza

Featured Publications

Enslaved by African angels: Swedenborg on African superiority, evangelization, and slavery (April 2023)

'Ghosts from other planets': plurality of worlds, afterlife and satire in Emanuel Swedenborg’s De Telluribus in mundo nostro solari (1758) (September 2020)

Research Centres

Publications