Sveinn Jóhannesson

Sveinn M. Jóhannesson studies American and global history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the relationship between the state, capitalism and scientific knowledge. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019 and was Past and Present Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institution of Historical Research, London, and Fennell Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Since 2022, Sveinn has been a research fellow and lecturer in history at the University of Iceland.

Sveinn's research has appeared in venues such as the Journal of American History and the Journal of Global History. During his Fellowship at the Koch History Centre, Sveinn is working on a new project on how natural scientists in the service of the American state shaped processes of territorialization, resource management and population control in the late nineteenth century through emerging notions of natural limits.

Sveinn's book, The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government, was published in 2026 by the University of Chicago Press.