The Division of History of Ideas and Sciences at Lund University has a broad research profile, encompassing a wide range of the discipline’s research areas: the history of philosophical, religious and political ideas, the history of knowledge, science, medicine, and technology. It is a well-established research environment, particularly in the fields of early modern history, the history of science, and the history of philosophy.

The research conducted in premodern and early modern history in Lund concerns the legal history of Christianity in the Middle Ages, the history of scholarship and culture in the early modern period, as well as the history of science, medicine, and technology. The research conducted in the history of science, closely linked to the established interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies, has cultivated a particularly strong profile in the history of the life sciences, biology, and medicine, spanning from eighteenth-century medicine and natural history to twentieth-century genetics and evolutionary biology. In more recent years, environmental history has also become a strong research field within the division. Additionally, research is conducted on the history of the humanities and social sciences in the twentieth century. Research in the history of philosophy focuses primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. A prominent research focus is the history of the philosophy of history.

Additional expertise is found in the political and global history of ideas, the history of emotions, and the history of the future. The division is at the forefront in advancing cognitive history as a field of study, exploring the history of thought, drawing inspiration from cognitive science and cognitive semiotics. Conceptual historical approaches serving also as a distinctive area of expertise within the division. The division has long-standing interdisciplinary research collaborations, both within the humanities—covering fields like book history, history, classical languages, and semiotics—and with researchers from other faculties, including theology, the natural sciences (astronomy, biology, ecology, and chemistry), and medicine. These collaborations also extend to multidisciplinary fields such as medical humanities, environmental humanities, and space humanities.

The research in the history of ideas and sciences generally emphasizes the importance of context—the situatedness of ideas in time and space—in understanding and interpreting historical phenomena. It explores how religious, philosophical, political, and scientific ideas interact with societal changes, as well as how ideas and knowledge have been created, transmitted, received and changed throughout history.