Mathias Persson

Mathias Persson holds a doctoral degree in history of science and ideas from Uppsala University. His dissertation, published in 2009, explores how Sweden was imagined in a major German review journal, Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Persson has since returned to the topic of how German eighteenth-century periodicals represented the Swedish realm in several international articles. From 2012 onwards, he has been based at the Department of Economic History in Uppsala, where he is presently concluding a monograph on the political and economic outlook of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, 1739–1792.

Within the framework of COMPACT, Persson will look into the so-called ‘Greenland Theory,’ according to which the world is actually still run by the Roman Empire and the standard conception of history an elaborate hoax perpetrated by nefarious and clandestine powers. The Greenland Theory will be related to similar, historically oriented designs by, for instance, Herbert Illig and Anatoly Fomenko as well as to the metaphysical musings of famed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who speculated that his own time was somehow superimposed on that of ancient Rome.

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