Joeri Bruyninckx (J.L.M.)

I am Assistant Professor in Science and Technology Studies, and member of the Maastricht University Science, Technology and Society (MUSTS) research group. 

In my research, I explore how scientific practices and new technologies give shape to everyday sensory/bodily experiences of the environment. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, I draw on a variety of disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies, Sensory Studies, History of science, technology and the environment, as well as Architecture and Design studies. 

My current research focuses on the interplay between science and design in the history of the office. Focusing specifically on the United States and the Netherlands, I examine how scientific or ergonomic research has shaped the office as a material environment for work in the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in the ideas that scientists and others held about mental labor and office work, how these have materialized and perpetuated through design, and how they (continue to) shape the everyday organization and experience of office work. I attend specifically to questions around the interior environment (lighting, acoustics, ventilation), desk and seating design, and the visual display. In conjunction to this, I am interested in the history of ergonomics as a field of applied science.  

I have previously published on twentieth-century field biology, contemporary experimental sciences, bioacoustics and applied acoustics. My first monograph Listening in the Field. Recording and the Science of Birdsong was published by MIT Press in 2018. In this book, I trace how sound recording technologies (such as musical notation or tape recorders) came to be used for the scientific study of birdsong, to examine how listening has been negotiated historically as a scientific practice.   

I studied at FASoS and hold a Ph.D. from the University of Maastricht (2013). Previously, I was a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, visiting researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.