Lino Camprubi

I am interested in intersections of science and technology with politics and philosophy. I pursue this interest through two main lines of research: first by exploring the links of engineering and political economy (mainly, but not only, in the twentieth-century Spanish context), and second by looking at the coevolution of oceanography and geopolitics with the history of the senses and maritime spaces (particularly in the Cold War Mediterranean).

My first book, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (MIT Press, 2014), explores the significance of the history of science and technology for producing more accurate understandings of political economies. My second book, Los ingenieros de Franco: Ciencia, catolicismo y Guerra Fría (Crítica, 2017), extends that view to the role of scientists in shaping international relations during the Cold War. I have published on phosphates and the Western Sahara, postcolonial nature conservation, energy dependency, and the global environment.

My main current project is a history of the Strait of Gibraltar as a chokepoint for global scientific, strategic, and environmental history. It focuses on submarine surveillance and the acoustic construction of maritime spaces.

In 2011 I obtained a PhD in History at UCLA. Then I was a Research Fellow in the ERC project “The Earth Under Surveillance.” For three years I was a Research Scholar in Department II of the MPIWG. In spring 2016, I was a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago. Since September 2017, I have been a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the UA Barcelona and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Research Group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics.”