The Centre for Textile Research was founded in 2005 as an international centre of excellence supported by the Danish National Research Foundation. Since 2015, CTR became integrated as a research centre at the Saxo Institute at UCPH. From 2005 to 2016, the director of CTR was Professor Marie-Louise Nosch. Since 2017, the CTR director is Associate Professor Eva Andersson Strand.
CTR focuses on textile research, via substantial research programs, international collaborative research projects, training young scholars, host MSC postdocs, organizing more than 40 conferences and courses and editing and publishing books and journals such as the peer reviewed journal, Archaeological Textiles Review, an open-access journal.
Professor Nosch is head editor of the book series Ancient Textiles Series, at present 30+ titles published at Oxbow Books, Oxford. Professor Andersson Strand is in the editorial team of Archaeological Textiles Review. Since 2005 the CTR team has published more than 1000+ works.
Research at CTR is also communicated through social media and blogs, as well as lectures and organized sessions at international conferences. CTR hosts an annual summer school (15 ECTS), and scholars are engaged in university teaching on all levels. The CTR team consists of historians, archaeologists, weavers, ethnologists, conservators, art historians, philologists, and work closely together with sciences within computer technology, chemistry etc. This integrated approach to textile research results in opening new research fields and a high degree of internationality of CTR‟s projects.
CTR is a centre within The Saxo Institute, with the disciplines History, Ethnology, Greek, Latin, Prehistoric Archaeology and Classical Archaeology. The Saxo Institute has c. 130 staff, including tenure track holders and support staff, as well as c. 2,000 students from BA to PhD.
The University of Copenhagen is the largest research institution in Denmark with more than 40,000 students of which 4,000 are international and more than 2500 PhD students, and 9,000 staff. Internationally, the UCPH is highly competitive and is ranked as one of the leading universities globally with the most recent Shanghai rankings placing the University as No. 30 worldwide and No. 6 in Europe.