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Dr Mats Fridlund (b. 1965) studies the political and cultural history of modern science and technology. He is born in Sweden where he studied engineering physics and history of science and technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, from which Department of History of Science and Technology he received his PhD in 1999. In 2006 he was appointed Associate Professor (lektor) of History of Technology at the History of Technology Division[1] of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the first such tenured position in Denmark. Previously he has held appointments in STS programs at Northwestern University, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Manchester, Swedish Institute for Studies of Education and Research (SISTER) and Linköping University.
His first book (in Swedish) Den gemensamma utvecklingen: Staten, storföretaget och samarbetet kring den svenska elkrafttekniken (1999),[2] examined the relationship between Swedish nationalism, engineering culture and the development of electric power technology through the lens of the 'development pair' between the Swedish State Power Board and the Asea company. It won the Nils Eric Svenson Award from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and received a grant for academic literature for "promoting quality and diversity in book publishing" from the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs.
The majority of past and present research is part of his research programme Engineering Ideologies: The Technopolitics of Engineering from Industrialism to Postindustrialism characterized by a two-sided approach to study the connections between engineering practice, knowledge and ideology. The first side consist of studying the internal cultures and ideologies of engineering through its connected professional practices, social networks and political and epistemological values, while the other side analyze the engineering of ideologies by designers and engineers who through technological activities un/knowingly worked to further or counter larger political agendas and cultural ideologies. Most recently, an ongoing project continues previous research on the ideologies and cultures of electrical engineering through a study of 'corporate luddism', i.e. resistance to technological innovation from managers, engineers, and industrial researchers in the electrical industry. Furthermore, in a new large project his approach is expanded to the new subject area of terrorism through a study of the history of the technologies of terrorism. It investigate what role the appropriation of industrial technologies and engineering expertise played in the rise of modern terrorism.