Ole Birk Laursen is Research Communicator in the "Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia" (ASTRA) Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is responsible for communicating the research of the group to a wider, non-specialist audience, conceptualizing and implementing outreach strategies, writing digital content for the website, and promoting and managing public events in close collaboration with the Research Communications and Management team.
Ole's research focuses on South Asian history, anticolonialism, and anarchism in the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. His first book, Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom (Hurst/Oxford UP/Penguin India, 2023), is an intellectual biography of India's most important anarchist activist and theoretician in the twentieth century. Ole has published extensively in international academic journals as well as in newspapers such as The Wire and Scroll, written several blog posts for non-specialist audiences, and appeared in a TV documentary about the Indian prince Victor Duleep Singh (Channel 4, UK). He has recently co-curated an exhibition on the history of the Berlin Mosque at the Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf (2024).
Ole holds a PhD in English (2012) from The Open University, UK, and an MA in History (2006) and a BA in English (2003) from Aarhus University, Denmark. From 2014-2016, he was a Carlsberg Foundation-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and he has held research fellowships at universities across Italy, Germany, France, and The Netherlands.