Faculty Fellow

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Associate Professor of British History, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College University of Chicago

Biography

His current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy. The British Industrial Revolution saw the birth of the first fossil fuel economy. At the same time, geologists transformed the public understanding of the earth's interior and deep past. His new project sets out to show that these developments—fossil growth and fossil science—converged to produce a fundamental reorientation of politics and culture towards cheap energy and cornucopian growth.

For more information, please visit his faculty listing.

fljonsso@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

Climate Change: Disciplinary Challenges to the Humanities and the Social Sciences

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2015 – 2016

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Projects

Deep History

This project supported the Visiting Fellowship of Daniel Lord Smail, whose innovative research on the material culture of the later Middle Ages operates at the intersection of history, anthropology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology.

Professor Dan Smail (Department of History, Harvard University) took up residence as a Neubauer Visiting Fellow in the Fall Quarter of 2015. Smail, who is a medievalist by training, has played a central role in pioneering a new scholarly approach known as Deep History, which operates at the ...

Project Team:

2015 – 2016

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Loïc Charles Paris 8

This project supported the Visiting Fellowship of Loïc Charles, who pursued research interests in the history of political economy, economic history, and the history of science with University faculty members.

Loïc Charles joined us for a year of scholarship on three projects. The first was a study of the interactions between the nascent science of political economy and the practice of the French economic administration in late eighteenth century in order to assess the impact of the former on the latter. ...

Project Team:

2015 – 2016

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Economics

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Planetary History: Growth in the Anthropocene

This project explored the history of planetary change through close analysis of the biophysical dimension of economic development and the history of earth system science.

One of the most striking and often remarked upon effects of climate change is its power to unsettle our basic understanding of the modern world. Our planet is changing into a strange and unstable new environment, in a process seemingly outside technological control. The fossil fuels that once ...

Project Team:

2018 – 2021

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