Mats Fridlund

I use historical methodologies to study the culture and politics of technological industrialization, innovation and use. The main focus of my current research is on the science, technology and materiality of terrorisms and its connections to transnational industrialization and globalization. An ongoing study investigates the materiality of non-state terrorism by analyzing the role appropriation of engineering expertise and industrial technologies such as dynamite, revolvers and print technologies have played in the rise of modern terrorism. My project Spreading Terror: Technology and Materiality in the Transnational Emergence of Terrorism, 1866-1898 has been awarded a multiyear grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR) within its research program "The Globalization of Society". Another complementary study analyze the development of urban 'terrormindedness', how cities and citizens have used technologies such as gas-masks, fallout shelters and security bollards to cope with man-made terror and terrorism. The majority of my earlier research is part of my research program Engineering Ideologies: Mentalities and Materialities of the Technopolitics of Engineering from Industrialism to Postindustrialism on the interaction between technological practice, knowledge and ideology within electric power and telecommunications, studying the internal cultures and ideologies of engineering and the engineering of ideologies through technological activities shaping larger political agendas and cultural ideologies. Most recently I have been taking part in institutionalizing digital humanities in Finland with a focus on developing new empirical research and methodologies in digital history. I am the Prinicipal Investigator in charge of of two digital history projects proposed by a collective of historians from some of the main Finnish universities and funded by the Kone Foundation. The projects are mapping the past, present and futuire of the development of digital history in Finland as well as investigating best practice of international and national solutions to organize digital history research as well as investigating the state of the art of historical scholarship using digital history tools and methods.

BACKGROUND

I have a masters degree (1992) in engineering physics and a PhD (1999) in history of science and technology from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Since 2000 I have held appointments in historical and contemporary science and technology studies at Linköping University, University of Manchester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Technical University of Denmark, Aarhus University, University of Copenhagen and University of Gothenburg. In 2006 I was appointed to the first Danish Associate Professorship of the History of Technology and in 2013 to the first Finnish Associate Professorship of the History of Industrialization.

Non-refereed scientific articles

Unrefereed journal articles

Radikale Mittel, gemäßigte Ziele Repression und Widerstand im Großfürstentum Finnland Fridlund, Mats; Sallamaa, Daniel 2016 in OSTEUROPA ISSN: 0030-6428

Review of Gabrielle Hecht, ed. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (MIT Press, 2011) Fridlund, Mats 2014 in ICON: JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY (F. Cass) ISSN: 1361-8113

Book section

Motståndets materialitet Oppositionella ting, tekniker och kroppar under Finlands ofärdsår Fridlund, Mats 2015 in Stockholm Papers in the History and Philosophy of Technology (KTH, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan) ISBN: 978-91-7595-407-3 ISSN: 0349-2842

Affording terrorism Idealists and materialities in the emergence of modern terrorism Fridlund, Mats 2012 in New Directions in Terrorism Studies (CONTINUUM) ISBN: 978-1-4411-3381-6

Unrefereed conference proceedings

Historizing topic models A distant reading of topic modeling texts within historical studies Fridlund, Mats; Brauer, René 2013

Engineering Terrorisms Technological Ingenuity, Innovation, and Impact in Urban Terror, 1807-2011 Fridlund, Mats 2012

Two new political and material histories of use Fridlund, Mats 2013