Dr Sveinn M. Jóhannesson
Koch History Centre Fellow
Wadham College
sveinn.johannesson@history.ox.ac.uk
I research and teach American and global history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the interconnected histories of the state, capitalism and science.
Research Interests
My research is guided by the central question of how power is constituted, conceptualized, and exercised within the early-/modern state. I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019 and previously studied at Vanderbilt University and the University of Oxford. My first monograph is entitled The Scientific-Military State: How Enlightened Engineers Reinvented Early American Government and was published by The University of Chicago Press in May 2026. Scholars have told us a great deal about the fiscal-military system that set the stage for the modern state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book charts a second transformation that took place in the ages of Enlightenment and Revolutions.
My research has also been published in leading venues, including the Journal of American History (2018 and forthcoming 2026), Journal of Global History (2026), Global Studies Quarterly (2026), and Contemporary European History (2025).
Before coming to Oxford, I was Past and Present Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, the University of London, Fennell Early Career Research Fellow in United States History at the University of Edinburgh, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at the University of Iceland in my native country.
Publications
The Scientific-Military State
University of Chicago Press, 2026
In The Scientific-Military State, Sveinn M. Jóhannesson charts the emergence of a new kind of governance in early-nineteenth-century America: the scientific-military state.
He argues that engineers influenced by French Enlightenment science built much of the machinery of America’s military state while redrawing the line between the federal government and society.