Lineage? Aarhus has a strong academic tradition in areas like logic, type theory, functional programming, and object oriented languages. Many influential researchers in these fields have come through there.

I also think there's a noticeable bias toward the US in how programming language research is perceived globally. Institutions like Aarhus often don't invest heavily in marketing or self-promotion, they just focus on doing solid work. It's not necessarily better or worse, but it does make it harder for their contributions to break through the layers of global attention.