Per Högselius

I hold an MSc degree in Engineering Physics from KTH (1998), a PhD in Innovation Studies from Lund University (2005) and a docent (habilitation) degree from KTH in History of Science and Technology (2009). As an undergraduate I also studied astronomy, history, literature and languages in Stockholm, Moscow, Greifswald and Tartu. In 2010-2011 I was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) and in 2013-2014 I spent a year as a Young International Scientist at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences (IHNS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

I was appointed Professor of History of Technology in 2018. In this role I mainly devote myself to transnational aspects in the history of technology and this field's intersection with environmental, economic and cultural history. My research projects have spanned themes such as Swedish, European and global energy history, natural resource extraction in colonial settings, transnational infrastructures in their cultural and political context, coastal history and various studies of the Baltic Sea region as a transnational space. At times I’ve been more oriented towards the deeper past, at other times towards the most burning issues of our own era. I have always seen it as a main task to integrate studies of past and present.

My books, which appeared in Sweden, Germany, Britain, the United States and Russia, make use of multiple writing styles to explore the interconnections between the human, the technical and the natural worlds. Apart from university textbooks and academic monographs, I have written essay collections and historical travelogues. My book Red Gas won the 2014 Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Europe’s Infrastructure Transition was one in a series of six books that collectively won the Chris Freeman Award. Death on the Beach: Essays from a Marginal World (2020, English translation 2024) was listed by Svenska Dagbladet as one of five not-to-be-missed Swedish non-fiction books published in 2020. See also my full list of single- and multi-authored books (including a few edited volumes) here.

As for my essays, take a look at my historical perspective on the European refugee crisis, my review of lighthouses in history as a love-affair between technological and literary symbolism, my approach to the mesmerizing histories of natural resources such as coal, sand and wood, or why not my sympathy for the Italian nuclear engineer Felice Vinci, who is convinced that the Iliad and the Odyssey are set in the Baltic Sea – my essay here subsequently inspired Swedish author Malena Lagerhorn to write her novel Ilion. In a similar way, my essay on the North Sea and its deeper past, published in Svenska Dagbladet, inspired playwright Andreas Boonstra to write his melancholic play Doggerland: att läsa Julia Blackburn.

From 2018 to 2024 I led the ERC Consolidator Grant project NUCLEARWATERS: Putting Water at the Centre of Nuclear Energy History. Currently my research efforts are mainly devoted to two projects on energy history: (1) Carbon Transnationalism: Conflict and Cooperation around Coal in Interwar Europe (2023-2026, funded by the Swedish Research Council, VR), and (2) The Rise and Fall of Nuclear Energy in Sweden (2024-2027, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, RJ).

See further www.perhogselius.com

Most recent books:

Gräv upp, hugg ned, pumpa ut: Människan och naturresurserna under 5000 år (Lund: Historiska Media, 2025). A collection of essays that explore 13 critically important natural resources in global historical perspective.

The Nuclear-Water Nexus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025). Co-edited with my ex-PhD student Siegfried Evens, this collection brings together 25 authors from 12 countries to discuss the intricate connections between nuclear power and water in past and present.

Death on the Beach: Essays from a Marginal World (London and Los Angeles: Barbican Press, 2024). The English version of my beach book originally published in Swedish back in 2020, with a new prologue and an additional final essay. Translated by Agnes Broomé.

The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (Budapest/Vienna/New York: Central European University Press, 2024). Co-authored with Achim Klüppelberg, this book provides a synthetic narrative of the Soviet Union’s nuclear history from the early days of scientific research in the 1920s to Russia’s war on Ukraine.