c:o/re Fellow 10/26 – 09/27
Joris Mercelisis a historian of technology, science, and capitalism. His work has focused on science-industry relations in the United States and Europe, approached from transnational and global perspectives. His first book, a revised version of his Ghent University dissertation, was published by the MIT Press in 2020 as Beyond Bakelite: Leo Baekeland and the Business of Science and Invention. His more recent research has examined, among other topics, the histories of scientific photography and laboratory techniques, the internationalization of corporate R&D, and the entry of women scientists into industry. Joris serves on the editorial advisory board of Ambix and the international advisory committee of Artefact. He is the incoming secretary of the Commission on the History of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences. Before moving to Germany, he was a faculty member in the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Paradoxes of (de)globalization: Science varieties and R&D internationalization in the twentieth century
As the neoliberal global political order unravels, historians and social scientists have begun to examine earlier periods of globalization—especially moments of slowdown and reversal—from novel perspectives. The term “deglobalization” has become a buzzword, though even researchers who embrace it caution that it should be used carefully. Their work shows that, both historically and today, declines in global interconnectedness in areas such as trade and migration have often coincided with intensification in others, creating seemingly paradoxical patterns that defy easy categorization.
Drawing on approaches from the history of science and technology and the history of multinational enterprise and global capitalism, this project explores how such paradoxes have shaped the internationalization of industrial research and development (R&D) during the twentieth century. The project examines two waves of foreign R&D investment by U.S. multinational corporations. The first occurred in the interwar period, when autarky-oriented initiatives reconfigured the political economy of science in authoritarian regimes as well as in liberal democracies. The second took place in the decades after World War II, a period of contested U.S.-led globalization.
The project comparatively examines these two episodes using new qualitative and quantitative evidence. It identifies changing rationales for foreign R&D under conditions of deglobalization and globalization and critically reevaluates the rise of the United States as a scientific and technological hegemon. It pays special attention to the integration of U.S. corporate R&D facilities into scientific systems and research cultures in host societies, including how American multinationals responded to and influenced distinctive features of these systems.
Publications (selection)
McManus, A., & Mercelis, J. (2027). Global Chemical Industry. In C. Reinhardt (ed.), Oxford Handbook on the History of Modern Chemistry. Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
Mercelis, J. (2024). The Long Shadow of Kodak: Internationalizing Industrial R&D and Photographic Science. Isis,115 (4), 695-719. https://doi.org/10.1086/733143
Mercelis, J. (2022). “Men Don’t Like to Work Under a Woman”: Female Chemists in the Photographic Manufacturing Industry, ca. 1918–1950. Ambix 69 (3), 291-319. https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2022.2097980
Mercelis, J. (2020). Beyond Bakelite: Leo Baekeland and the Business of Science and Invention.MIT Press.
Mercelis, J., Galvez-Behar, G., & Guagnini, A. (eds.) (2017). Commercializing Science: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Academic Scientists as Consultants, Patentees, and Entrepreneurs. History and Technology, 33 (1), 4-151.