Mats Fridlund

Mats Fridlund is a historian of science, technology and industrialization with a PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, 1999. He has held positions at various universities such as the University of Manchester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Imperial College London, Northwestern University, University of Copenhagen, University of Gothenburg and Aalto University. In 2006, he was appointed to the first tenured history of technology professorship in Denmark; in 2013, to Finland’s first professorial position in the history of industrialization.

At the MPIWG, he is working on his next book project The Uses and Abuses of Things which uses historical case studies to develop artifact-focused concepts of technology-in-use. Overall, his research focuses on the cultural and political history of technology and materiality; it evolved from the history of electric power technologies and engineering as presented in his award-winning Swedish monograph The Mutual Development: The State, Big Industry and the Collaboration on the Swedish Electric Power Technology (1999) to his current research program examining the role of technology in the emergence and globalization of terrorism since the nineteenth century, as outlined in the History & Technology article “Bollards, Buckets and Bombs” (2011) and the chapter “Affording Terrorism” in the anthology Terrorism and Affordance (2012). Since 2012, he has worked on institutionalizing digital humanities in Nordic countries and currently leads two Kone Foundation research projects to strengthen digital history in Finland.