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.
Kathryn Furlong
Kathryn Furlong is a professor in the Geography Department and academic director of the Center for International Studies (CÉRIUM) at the Université de Montréal in Canada. She held the Canada Research Chair in Water and Urbanization from 2011 – 2021 and acted as the co-director for the Ethics and Environment axis of the Center for Research on Ethics (CRÉ) from 2014 – 2021.
Her research focusses on public services, infrastructure, urbanization, debt and financialization from a political ecology perspective. Her book Leaky Governance: Alternative service delivery and the myth of water utility independence (UBC Press, 2016) explores some of these issues in the Canadian context, while her recent edited volume with Alejandro Camargo and Denisse Roca Servat La urbanización de las aguas en Colombia (Editorial UPB, 2022) looks at these topics in the Colombian context.
As a visiting scholar at KTH, she will work on completing the manuscript for The Miracle of Debt: Medellín “Metropolis de Servicios”, which examines the relationship between miracles and crises in political economy and the entanglement of wealth and debt therein. She will also work on the revisions for a co-authored manuscript, with Martine Verdy and Camila Patino S., Maîtres chez eux: Churchill Falls, la fondation d’Hydro-Québec au Labrador (PUM, submitted 2022), which examines a little discussed dam project developed in northern Canada in the 1970s.
Period: November 2023 to May 2024
Tijana Rupcic
Tijana Rupcic is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Central European University in Vienna. Tijana’s doctoral research examines the Balkan states’ transnational cooperation during the Cold War to develop their electrical grid between 1945 and 1975, focusing on the infrastructural development mirrored in major projects such as the building of the Iron Gate Hydro and Navigational System. She focuses on the Balkans’ unique position outside the established center-satellite system in Eastern Europe and the NATO-USSR bloc. Beyond her case study, she is very interested in transhumanism and video game studies, as well as the relationship between science and religion.
Period: October to December
James Dunk
James Dunkis a Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, where he is part of the ARC Discovery Project Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts. A historian and interdisciplinary researcher, his research, teaching and writing explores how concepts and technologies of self are changing in the face of planetary crises, with particular interest in mental health and planetary health. He co-directs the Ecological Emotions Research Lab with Paul Rhodes, and in 2022 he and Rhodes were Collaborative Fellows at the Sydney Environment Institute.
His award-winning first book, Bedlam at BotanyBay, focused on the political and social apparatus which emerged around madness in the penal colony of New South Wales, a place constituted by dramatic and often forced relocation. His recent work turns to experiences of similarly dramatic change in the environment itself, finding expression in eco-anxiety solastalgia, and other ecological emotions, related to ecosystem collapse, climate change, and other disruptions in earth systems. His research on planetary health, mental health and ecological distress has been published in various international journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Sustainability, History of Psychology, Australian Psychologist and Rethinking History, and his literary reviews and essays appear in various places.
During his visit with the KTH Division of Science, Technology and Environment James will present his research on planetary mental health and participate in a conversation about the intersection of global health and global environmental governance, and explore possible collaborations around planetary health with Environmental Humanities Laboratory researchers.
Period: August to September
Carolina Granado
Carolina Granado, is a PhD candidate at the Institut d’Historia de la Ciència at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (iHC, UAB). Her academic background is in Physics and Mathematics, which she studied at UAB in 2017. In 2020, she completed a Master's degree in history and philosophy of science at the Université de Paris (VII, Diderot).
Her research focuses on the establishment of the global assessment on climate change and the role of experts during the period from 1985 to 1992. Specifically, she have studied the role of the Swedish climatologist Bert Bolin in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). From now on, she will also explore the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, an institution that existed between 1986 and 1990 and had a key role in the politicization of the climate change issue. Stockholm was an important place for this organization, as a significant part of its work was coordinated by Gordon Goodman from the Stockholm Environmental Institute. Her research interests include the history of climate science, the relationships between scientists, experts, and politics, science and diplomacy, and science and gender.
During her stay at KTH Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, she will be working with Sverker Sörlin and Eric Paglia. She will also be visiting The Center for the History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), which hosts the KVA archives.
Period: May to June
Luca Thanei
Luca Thanei is a doctoral student at the Chair for the History of Technology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He focuses on near-Earth space as a resource for space-based technologies. More specifically, he investigates specific historical events between 1970 and 2010 in which space agencies’ modeling of this resource turned out to be deficient. The doctoral studies are supervised by Prof. David Gugerli (ETH) and Prof. Sabine Höhler (KTH).
From January to September 2023, he will visit the Division of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH. While at KTH, he will be affiliated with the project “The Mediated Planet: Claiming Data for Environmental SDGs” and will be working on a chapter investigating how the unexpected data from a radar test in the late 1970s began reshaping the prevailing perception of near-Earth space as a resource.
