I am happy to supervise graduate students on maritime and environmental history. In the past I have supervised fifteen doctoral students and have mentored nine postdoctoral researchers. I have served as external PhD examiner at the Universities of Glasgow, Stirling, East Anglia, Cork, Tromsø, and Utrecht, and have been an external examiner at all Danish universities. Since 2011 I have directed the Irish Structured PhD programme in digital arts and humanities.

 My current research interest is North Atlantic fisheries c. 1400-1700, and more generally the interdisciplinary combination of marine science and history. I have studied the impact of war on everyday life in Norway, Sweden and Denmark between 1550 and 1914 and published widely on medieval and early modern marine environment, coastal communities, and maritime culture. A special interest area for me are the Viking settlements in Ireland. I have published more than a hundred academic papers and several books. At Trinity College Dublin I have had the privilege of being the founding Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, the Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Previously I have been Rector of Roskilde University and Professor at Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark. I began my career as a curator at the Danish Fisheries and Maritime Museum. I served for four years as head of the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and was the founding President of the EU-funded network of research councils Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). I chaired the METRIS committee (Monitoring European Trends in Research in the Socio-economic sciences and humanities) for the EU Directorate-General for Research. I have served as President of three international academic organisations (European Society for Environmental History, the Association for the History of the Northern Seas, and the European Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres. In 2015 I was elected President of the European Alliance of Social Sciences and Humanities. I am a member of the editorial boards of several academic journals (Humanities, Mariners' Mirror, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Global Environment, Journal of Marine and Island Cultures). I have been awarded visiting research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and the San Cataldo Foundation in Amalfi, Italy. I was a co-awardee of the prize for the Best Research of the Year 2009 by videnskab.dk, a Danish science magazine, and was knighted by the Danish Queen for services to research in 2008. In 2011 the Japanese Cosmos Prize was awarded to the Scientific Steering Committee (of which I was a member) of the Census of Marine Life. In 2015 I was elected a Member of Academia Europaea. For the years 2016-2020 I hold a European Research Council Advanced Grant.