Jaume Valentines-Álvarez

Jaume Valentines-Álvarez (Barcelona, 1977) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for the History of Science and Technology in Lisbon (CIUHCT) and Assistant Professor at the Nova University of Lisbon. He holds a degree in Industrial Engineering (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, 2002), a degree in History (University of Barcelona, 2005) and a PhD in History of Science (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2012). Since 2003 he has been working at the Research Center for the History of Technology (CHRT, Polytechnic University of Catalonia), and has benefited from research stays at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHoSTM, Imperial College London, 2010) and the AHC in Granada (University of Granada, 2011).

Jaume's works mainly focus on engineering, artefacts, and politics in the twentieth century. In particular, his research interests are the entanglement of nationalism, technocracy, and crises in Southern Europe, the tensions between state and popular technologies of surviving the air-raids during the Spanish Civil War, the fascist legacies of urban nuclear reactors, and—at an early stage—fun and violence as resistances to large-scale technologies in the Iberian Peninsula and colonial Mozambique. The week before moving to Berlin, he (co-)submitted a special issue proposal entitled “Fun And Fear: the Banalisation of Nuclear Technologies through Display.” Beyond the academy, he has been involved in engineering projects of self-managed low-tech micro-energies (biogas), and is a current member of the co-operative of historians "Allaqqat."