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.
Aliaksandr Piahanau
Dr. Aliaksandr Piahanau is a historian of modern Europe with a particular interest in international relations between the two world wars. Before coming to Sweden, Aliaksandr combined different research positions in Italy, France, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia and Belarus. As a Wenner-Gren postdoc at the Division of History of Science, KTH (April 2021 – April 2023), he is exploring together with Pr. Per Högselius the devastating coal crisis, which paralised transport and industry in most European countries from 1918 to 1921. Framing it as the first European energy shortage, Aliaksandr is looking how the coal crisis affected the restoration of peace in war-torn lands of Central Europe and the work of the Paris Peace Conference.
Period: April 2021 – April 2023
Melina Antonia Buns
Melina Antonia Buns is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and visiting postdoc at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment.
From December 2021 to November 2024, she is PI of ‘
Nuclear Nordics: Radioactive Waste Spatialities, Materialities and Societies in the Nordic Region, 1960s to 1990s
’, funded by the Research Council of Norway (324293) and placed at The Greenhouse/University of Stavanger, Norway. As part of this International Mobility Grant, Melina will be visting postdoc at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, from 2021 to 2023. At KTH, Melina is affiliated with the research group '
NUCLEARWATERS
', led by Per Högselius.
She holds a PhD from the University of Oslo (June 2021), with the thesis ‘Green Internationalists: Nordic Environmental Cooperation, 1967-1988’. She has been visiting doctoral candidate at Lund University, Sweden, and at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, Germany. As an international and environmental historian, her interests include Nordic history and cooperation, international environmental policies, nuclear history, environmental movements, and transnational history.
Period: December 2021 - December 2023
Hedda Susanne Molland
Hedda Susanne Molland is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Bergen visiting the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH. In her research, she focuses on how scope of action on climate change is imagined in climate policies, with a specific emphasis on the role of time and the future. Her case study is how the previous Norwegian Government (2013-2021) promoted carbon capture and storage and rainforest conservation as climate measures to Parliament. Beyond her case study, she is very interested in interdisciplinary research on climate change, the environment and sustainability, including approaches in intellectual and political history, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. While at KTH she is studying the policy for carbon capture and storage called “Langskip”, which was presented to the Norwegian Parliament in 2020-2021. She has a BA in the History of Ideas and an MA in Environmental and Development Studies at the University of Oslo.
Period: March to June
Hanna Klaubert
Hannah Klaubert is currently completing her bi-national PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany, and at the Department of English, Stockholm University. Her dissertation with the title "Narrating Nuclear Disaster: Literary Forms and Affective Modes after Chernobyl and Fukushima" examines how fictional and non-fictional narratives give shape to and negotiate the challenges arising in the aftermath of nuclear disaster – such as the anxiety of living with an imperceptible threat or the difficulty to establish cause and effect or victimhood and guilt. Hannah was a guest at the Nuclear Waters project in March 2022.
Period: March
Virginia Magnaghi
Virginia Magnaghi is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy). She is currently a visiting fellow at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH (March-June 2022). Her doctoral research focuses on the pictorial and literary representation of Italian rural landscape under Fascism.
She is particularly interested in exploring the contribution of art history to landscape studies. In 2021 she was a Research Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, where she worked on the artist Mario Schifano and on his early painted landscapes (1963-66).
Period: March to June
Tanja Riekkinen
Tanja Riekkinenis a PhD candidate in History and a university teacher at the University of Oulu, Finland. She is visiting the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment in September 2022. Tanja’s research interests include the history of oil, energy and energy transitions. Her doctoral project, titled “Petrofutures: Imagining the Energy Transition to Oil in Finland from the Late 1940s to the Early 1970s” combines approaches from history, science and technology studies and energy humanities. This research has been funded by the Kone Foundation, the Otto A. Malm Foundation, and the Kerttu Saalasti Foundation (2018-2022). Previously, Tanja has worked as a project researcher. She is an active member of several boards and committees, including the European Society for Environmental History Next Generation Action Team, the Finnish Society for Regional and Environmental Studies and the early career researchers committee of the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers.
