Personal profile
Short presentation
Between February 2025 and June 2026, I am a visiting researcher at the Saxo Institute and the Centre for Sustainable Futures. The visiting position is part of a three year postdoc, funded by the Swedish Research Council International Postdoc Grant, which will also involve research stays at University of Chicago and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
The project will situate the early history of geophysics in the history of environmental knowledge. It will follow the proliferation of the geophysics concept in three different settings – international scientific organizations, the petroleum industries and among Scandinavian scientists in the Arctic – between 1918 and 1958. The project will turn to geophysics as not merely a scientific discipline, but as an emergent regime of planetarity which came to structure ways of knowing the spatial and temporal properties of the planet. Through three archival case studies, the project will provide a history of how geophysics shaped the planet as an object of knowledge and extraction and thereby offer an alternate genealogy of present deliberations on planetary-scale environmental infrastructures.
I defended my doctoral dissertation Planetary Timemaking: Paleoclimatology and the Temporalities of Environmental Knowledge, 1945-1990 in October 2023. As a part of the research project SPHERE, my doctoral research concerned how planetary timescales were increasingly incorporated into human history and global environmental governance in the postwar period. As human impact on the environment began to be understood in planetary terms, practices aimed at tracking environmental changes over vast periods of time, such as ice- and deep sea core drilling, were drawn into the political spotlight. They spoke to more than just the deep past, as they gradually became immersed in the work to predict, visualize and alter the trajectories of the living conditions on the planet. By combining history of science, environmental history and theory of history, I showed how the temporalities of environmental knowledge was constantly renegotiated during these formative decades and how ice- and deep sea cores could be reduced to input to computerized climate models.
I have a broad interest in history of science, environmental history and theory of history and I am always keen to explore new collaborations. A complete list of my publications can be found here.
In addition to my postdoc project, I am also affiliated with the Future Humanities Initiative at KTH and I am a contributing critic at the Swedish daily Expressen.