Overview
Lundin is a visiting scholar at the Department of S&TS at Cornell University. He has faculty position as a Professor of History of Technology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg with a PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
His research concerns the interaction between science, technology and the state, especially the role of expertise in state-led reforms and the build-up and transformation of the twentieth century Swedish welfare state as well as its lesser-known twin, the security state. His empirical examples range from agriculture and town and regional planning to computing and defense.
Research Focus
In his current research, Lundin combines approaches from economic history and history of science with the aim to produce a new narrative of the political economy of Swedish research. He argues that the historiography of Swedish research and research policy has uncritically based its conclusions based on discourse produced by academic scientists. This has resulted in a standard narrative of assumptions; about Swedish post-war research being concentrated in the university sector, about the prevalence of research councils and about dominant political preferences for ‘pure’ or ‘basic’ scientific research. Guided by questions of economic proportions, how money was distributed and which groups in society governed the research, he challenges these ideas by examining the actual proportions and targets of funding.
Lundin’s research is supported by the Swedish Research Council.
Publications
- "The limits of academization: Agricultural policy and the shaping of Swedish higher agricultural education during the interwar and war year," Agricultural History Review 71, no. 2 (2023): 234–257.
- “Making History Matter: The Historian as Expert,” Mobility in History: The Yearbook of the International Society for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility 7 (2016): 7–16.
- “The Reform Technocrats: The Strategists of the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–60,” in Scientists’ Expertise as Performance: Between State and Society, 1860–1960, ed. Joris Vandendriessche, Evert Peeters and Kaat Wils (Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 135–146. (with Niklas Stenlås)
- The Making of European Consumption: Facing the American Challenge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). (co-edited with Thomas Kaiserfeld)
- “Confronting Class: The American Motel in Early Post-war Sweden”, Journal of Tourism History 5, no. 3 (2013): 305–324.
- Science for Welfare and Warfare: Technology and State Initiative in Cold War Sweden (Science History Publications, 2010). (co-edited with Niklas Stenlås and Johan Gribbe)
- “Mediators of Modernity: Planning Experts and the Making of the ‘Car-Friendly’ City in Europe,” in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, ed. Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa (MIT Press, 2008), 257–279.