Skip to main content
To KTH's start page

Guests at the Division 2020

Every year we welcome several visiting scholars and other academic staff. Some come to teach in courses or in other ways collaborate with us, others come mainly to do their own research. One thing they all have in common is that they become a big part of the Division.

Laura Pietilä is an freshly graduated MA in Global environmental history from Uppsala University and is visiting the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH for a few months for an internship. She have an interest towards narratives, storytelling, transdisciplinary practices, visuality as a form of knowledge creation and landscape studies, which she also touched upon in her master’s thesis.		 October to March
Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius is an environmental historian and a visiting fellow at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. She is a PhD-candidate at the University of Oslo, where she is part of the interdisciplinary project ‘LIFETIMES: a Natural History of the Present’ (www.temporalities.no).  Her project is about the colonial histories of Dutch hydraulic engineering, and space-making practices of engineers in imperial and domestic settings between the 1860s and 1930s. In particular, she works on the grand-scale land-reclamation plan called the Zuiderzee Works, and the production and working imaginaries of ‘empty space’ and ‘new land’ as a vector of modernist agendas of capitalist production. By means of people, documents, and practices, these notions travelled between the Dutch domestic sphere and its imperial spaces. During her time at the division, Leonoor will be looking into expedition and mapping as environmental knowledge production in the Dutch colony Surinam, where Dutch hydraulic engineers were employed by the colonial administration to reclaim and uncover possible resources for elite investors.		 March to June
Simona Quagliano is a Lerici Fellow visiting the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. She is an architect and currently she is a Ph.D student in urban planning at the University of Naples Federico II. Her doctoral research investigates the role of governance for cities in transition mainly in the context of climate change. After her graduation in 2015, she has focused on urban regeneration and social innovation and sha has worked, researched and collaborated with different institution. From 2012 she is an active memeber of Legambiente, an Italian environmental organization.		 January to March

Beatriz Martinez Ruiz is a historian of science from Spain working in Paris on her doctoral thesis in the project “Salt, Vessels and Maps: the Discovery of the Mediterranean Salt Giant” that Peder is involved in. Her research project is framed in the ETN SaltGiant, a scientific project that aims to study a particular geological feature of the Mediterranean’s seafloor (official website: https://www.saltgiant-etn.com  and the ESR’s blog: thesaltgiantfellowship.wordpress.com  ).

"From my side, as the historian of the ETN, my goal is to add a historical perspective to their current researches. Thus, in my PhD project, I’m studying how the Mediterranean seafloor was constructed as a new space (maybe a new environment or territory, we could even say?), becoming a disputed arena where scientific research, industrial interests and political concerns entangled and influenced one upon the others during the 1960s and 1970s. More precisely, I'm exploring how marine geosciences in France, Italy and the USA were related to, and depended on, the oil industry’s activities, national political agendas, and international scientific programs (such as the American-led Deep Sea Drilling Project); while constructing along their development the Mediterranean's seafloor. I’m especially interested in science and diplomacy, geopolitics in the seas and the development of earth sciences, particularly during the cold war."

 January to May
Andrei Stsiapanau is a Belarussian researcher lecturing on nuclear technopolitics in Lithuania, and he is a guest in the Nuclear Waters project.  January to June