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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 uses an interdisciplinary combination of archival research, oral traditions, tacit skills and material science to research histories of material practices and how those practices shape differing ways of knowing the world. For an example of this approach reframing canonical history of physics with Indigenous cosmo-politics, see 'The face of a metal and the skin of a bomb' (link to pdf).
Her work seeks to foreground and centre histories of marginalised sciences, such as Indigenous knowledges in Jamaica, both for their importance to dominant traditions in the physical sciences and on their own terms. For a recent presentation of this research, see: 'Performances on the World Stage', Greg Dening Memorial Lecture, University of Melbourne, 2021 (link to recording).
Current interests include coal, metallurgy, and magic lanterns. More generally, Jenny is interested in historical perspectives on social justice issues in climate science; energy; global supply chains; automation; geospatial mapping; and mineral prospecting and extraction.
She has worked on a number of experimental reconstruction and analysis projects, winning grant funding to lead technical and archival research into innovation in elastic glass for precision timepieces, ('Riotous assemblage and the materials of regulation', awarded a 2020 Daumas Prize, link to pdf) and the importance of whaling lore to geomagnetic instrumentation and survey, ('Cetacean citations and the covenant of iron', link to pdf), as well as the opportunity to work with artist/artisan/scholar, Andrew Lacey, to reverse-engineer bronzes recently attributed to Michelangelo (link). 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, ('The industrial archaeology of deep time', link to pdf). During her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge and Greenwich National Maritime Museum (link), Jenny was employed by the Polar Museum to research their ethnographic Arctic collection; and by the Whipple Museum to survey early modern networks of glass-making knowledge (link).
For her work with artists, expert practitioners, engineers, and material scientists, Jenny was listed one of Apollo Magazine’s 'top ten thinkers in Art and Tech' in 2020 (link). She is a member of UCL Anthropocene (link); gloknos: Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (link); and the Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity (link).
Teaching summary
Lead:- Science and the Global System (HPSC0144)
- Science in the 19th Century (HPSC0081)
- Nanotechnology and Society (ELEC0123)
- Science, Identity and Global Perspectives (HPSC0034)
- History of Modern Science (HPSC0010)
- History of Science: Antiquity to Enlightenment (HPSC0003)
- Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (HPSC0073)
- STS Perspectives on Big Problems (HPSC0011)
Education
- Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy |