Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
King's College London
I am a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s and a postdoctoral researcher at
the Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment, KTH
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. My research focus is Swedish
twentieth-century history of science and technology. I mainly work in two
particular fields: technological and scientific aspects of agricultural change;
and the role of scientific and technological expertise in the development
of Swedish relations with the so-called developing world following World
War II.
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These met in my PhD thesis (2016), in which I analyzed the role played by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in the creation and development of Swedish foreign aid in veterinary medicine, agriculture, and forestry. Afterwards, I worked for some time in a project on Swedish “resource colonialism” in the short twentieth century, in which two colleagues and I studied how public and private actors in (ostensibly non-colonial) Sweden organized themselves around interests in natural resources in colonial and post-colonial areas. More recently, I have also been co-editing a volume on the academization of the agricultural sciences in Sweden. Since 2018, I have been funded by the Swedish Research Council under its “International Postdoc” grant (which also finances my stay at King’s). In the SRC research project, I examine the co-production of veterinary expertise, reproductive technologies, and practices of dairy cattle breeding in Sweden between c. 1920 and 1970.
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Research Projects:
I am currently working on a project called ”Clinical Breeding” (funded by the Swedish Research Council), which analyzes veterinary reproductive science in the context of Swedish dairy farming and dairy cattle breeding in the early and mid-twentieth century. For more information see:
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Recent Publications:
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Karl Bruno and Per Lundin, eds., Önskad och ifrågasatt: Lantbruksvetenskapernas akademisering i 1900-talets Sverige [Desired and Disputed: The Academization of the Agricultural Sciences in Twentieth-Century Sweden]. Lund: Arkiv, (2020).
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Bruno, Karl. “The Government’s Business? Swedish Foreign Policy and Commercial Mineral Interests in Liberia, 1955–1980.” Scandinavian Journal of History 43, no. 5 (2018): 624–645.
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Bruno, Karl. "Disciplining Cattle Reproduction: Veterinary Reproductive Science, Bull Infertility, and the mid-Twentieth Century Transformation of Swedish Diary Cattle Breeding," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (forthcoming).
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Grants, Awards, and Prizes:
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2018: International Postdoc grant (~2 900 000 SEK) from the Swedish Research Council.
