Dr Jenny Bulstrode

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 addition she has previously been employed as researcher for the Arctic Catalogue Project at the Polar Museum, and a survey of early modern optical glass working hosted by the Whipple Museum. In 2014 she was awarded the British Society for the History of Science's Singer Prize, which became the basis for her published work on The Industrial Archaeology of Deep Time. Jenny’s doctoral research on the globalising role of British geomagnetism in the age of revolution and reform was completed at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.