As most humanities scholars working on ip, I started out with copyright. No Trespassing (University of Toronto Press, 2004) looked at the history of international copyright but also on new technologies (in this case the photocopier). Four years later, Terms of Use appeared with the same publisher, but used the metaphor of the jungle to look at the public domain/the commons. Next, I brought together a few published articles and new writing on one of my longstanding interests: translation, which became the 2011 book Cosmopolitan Copyright: Law and Language in the Translation Zone.

But now I was done with copyright. For various reasons, one of them being Marie Curie, I had become increasingly interested in patents. I was lucky to get a few years to work on Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), a book that was really key to the ERC Advanced Investigator Grant I received in 2016 for the project "Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020," (PASSIM).

So this is where I am today. Most of my focus is on PASSIM, leading the project's various activities in the period that remains, but also thinking about various ways new and exciting stuff could emerge from our work. Here are three ideas:

First, I believe that there is much more to do on patents in relation to the development of information infrastructures more generally. Huge topic, amorphous and difficult to pin down, but has significant potential, especially as a global history. 

Second, I'm slowly developing a book project on champagne/Champagne. From an ip-perspective, of course, but not only in terms of geographical indications. I want to understand the importance of these bubbles in relation to classification, maps, mobilization of interests, inheritance, land, luxury, Frenchness and much more.

Third: I'd like to find a way to integrate these two interests in the emerging research hub COMPASS at Linköping University, where we want to develop a platform for the study of the intersection between forms and norm of knowledge.