Dr Vincent Roy-Di Piazza

Associate Researcher

History Faculty

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

I am a historian of science, religion, and political economy, specialised in northern Europe. I obtained my DPhil at Oxford in 2022, where I then worked as an Arts and Humanities research council postdoctoral fellow.

I am currently a European research council postdoctoral fellow at the University of Jyväskylä (JYU) in Finland, working in the ERC-Consolidator De-centering eighteenth century political economy: rethinking growth, wealth, and welfare in the Swedish Empire (2024-2028, grant agreement ID: 101088549).

I am an associate researcher of the Oxford History Faculty, and an associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Research Interests

I welcome inquiries related to the following topics of interests:

• History of science, medicine, and religion (1500-1900)

• History of early modern political economy, colonialism, and slavery

• Natural science and environmental history

• History of the body, race and sexuality

• History of literature and satire

• European, Atlantic, and Nordic history

I am currently focusing on two projects:

• I am working on a monograph investigating the links between political economy and colonialism in Sweden, 1700-1815. This monograph builds on my previous research on natural science, religion, and political economy in northern Europe. My publications in this area range from the history of Swedish imperial science (Etudes Germaniques, 2021) to debates over colonisation, race, and slavery (Intellectual History Review, 2023), sexuality, population, and entomology (Revue de Synthèse, 2024), and the links between Linnaean science and race (forthcoming in 2025).

• I am also working on a new biography of the Swedish parliamentarian, philosopher and mystic theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). I have written and lectured about various aspects of Swedenborg's life and thought (most recently in Politica Hermetica, 2023) and I have a broader interest in currents related to his ideas and posterity.

In my previous research, I wrote on the history of astronomy and literature. I have published on the links between cosmology, the afterlife, and the plurality of worlds (Annals of Science, 2020) extending to travelogues and satire. My article on the subject has become one of the most-read in the Annals of Science, and you can read my popular blogpost on this research for the Voltaire Foundation.

Contact

You can find out more about my research on my personal webpage, and reach out via X/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