Hello everyone!
My name is Odinn Melsted and I recently joined the History Department and MUSTS as a postdoc. My research here is part of Cyrus Mody’s project “Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity.”
Within the project, I will mainly focus on the oil industry and its involvement with sustainability and scarcity debates of the 1970s and the use of forecasting techniques to prepare for an uncertain future. I will also explore the links between the oil industry and geothermal energy development, and the question inasmuch oil companies helped and hindered the reduction of environmental pollution to combat acid rain and climate change with technologies and strategies for desulfurization and decarbonization.
As a native and citizen of both Iceland and Austria, I have lived, worked and studied in both countries, most recently at the University of Innsbruck, where I obtained my doctorate in history with a dissertation on “Icelandic Energy Regimes: Fossil Fuels, Renewables and the Making of a Low-Carbon Energy Balance, 1940-1980.”
I look forward to meeting all of you in the coming months, hopefully also beyond Zoom one day. Feel free to write me to get in touch or if you have any questions about Iceland and its peculiar past (and presence): o.melsted@maastrichtuniversity.nl.
