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Science and Technology Studies

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Dr Jenny Bulstrode

Dr Jenny Bulstrode

Lecturer in History of Science and Technology

Dept of Science & Technology Studies

Faculty of Maths & Physical Sciences

Joined UCL
1st Jul 2020

Research summary

Jenny's time is split between UCL STS and the Royal Institution, where she researches the history of physics and industrial technology, with a particular interest in the universalising claims of science and capitalism, and cross-cultural encounters in experiment, innovation and materials. 

Full CV here: https://ucl.academia.edu/JennyBulstrode/CurriculumVitae

Teaching summary

  • Big Problems, Department of Science and Technology Studies 

  • Science and Decolonising Modernity, Department of Science and Technology Studies

  • Science in the Nineteenth Century, Department of Science and Technology Studies

  • Nanotechnology and Society, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering

 

Biography

Before joining UCL, Jenny began a Jesus College Junior Research Fellowship in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, carrying out postdoctoral research on the industrial origins of climate change with a particular focus on globalisation and fossil capital. During this period she was awarded a 2020 Maurice Daumas Prize for her paper Riotous Assemblage.

In 2018 she was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Sarton Prize for the History of Science, which enabled her to develop new research on the debt of the British industrial revolution to the innovations of West African metallurgy in the Atlantic system, and using materials as instruments to exchange perspectives in the study of art, industry, and science.

Prior to this award she held research fellowships at the Greenwich National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, respectively considering cultural and technical histories of metal. She has worked on a number of experimental reconstruction and analysis projects, winning grant funding to lead technical and archival research into glass balance-springs for 19th century precision timepieces, and magnetic instrumentation in the whaling industry, as well as the opportunity to act as technical assistant on the reverse-engineering of bronzes recently attributed to Michelangelo. In 2014, her research into flints and paper in the industrial origins of experimental archaeology won the British Society for the History of Science Singer Prize. In addition she has previously been employed as researcher for the Arctic Catalogue Project at the Polar Museum (Blogs 1-8), and a survey of early modern optical glass working hosted by the Whipple Museum.

Her doctoral research was completed at the University of Cambridge (Wolfson College) and charted the global role of geomagnetic research in the age of reform and Atlantic revolution.

Publications