Finn Arne Jørgensen is Associate Senior Lecturer (tenure track) in History of Technology and Environment at Umeå University, Sweden since August 2010. He has a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2007), where he also had a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Research Council of Norway. In 2005-2006 he was a visiting researcher at Department of Science, Technology, and Society, University of Virginia, USA.

Recycling Infrastructures | He is the author of Making a Green Machine: The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling (Rutgers University Press, 2011), which examines the modern history of recycling of bottles and cans in Norway, Sweden, and the United States. The book especially focuses on the development of technological solutions for handling a problem that has been transformed from infrastructural to environmental over the course of the last 40 years, and the implications of this transformation for consumers, policy makers, and businesses. This project grows out of his interest in the histories of waste, recycling, and technologically mediated modern environmentalism.

Leisure Cabins | Jørgensen’s current research looks at the technological and environmental history of the Norwegian hytte (leisure cabin), a building of considerable significance in Norwegian nature and culture. This project traces the growth of the leisure cabin from the urban discovery of the Norwegian countryside in the late 1800s, through the expansion of private automobilism in the 1960s, until the present, where one out of every five residential buildings in Norway is a leisure home. The project pays close attention to the cabin-driven extension of technological networks, ideals, and cultural expectations from urban to nature areas, and how certain forms of cabin living have become culturally synonymous with authentic living in touch with history, despite being a historically new phenomenon. He maintains a research blog called Hyttedrømmen for this project.

He actively participates in the international history of technology and environment research communities. He serves on the Executive Council of the Society for History of Technology and on the Board of the European Society for Environmental History. In 2009, he founded the Nordic Environmental History Network (NEHN), funded by Nordforsk. He is an editor for the H-Sci-Med-Tech mailing list, the world’s leading discussion list for the history of science, medicine, and technology.