Odinn Melsted (O.)

Odinn Melsted is an Austrian-Icelandic historian and currently Assistant Professor in the History Department and MUSTS Research Cluster at Maastricht University. His main research interests lie in the transnational history energy, technology, and environment, with a special focus on historical sustainability transitions. 

Before coming to Maastricht, he studied history (BA) and European languages, history and culture (MA) at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík and obtained his doctorate in history from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, with a dissertation on “Icelandic Energy Regimes: Fossil Fuels, Renewables and the Making of a Low-Carbon Energy Balance, 1940-1980.” In 2020, he joined Maastricht University as a postdoc in the NWO-funded research project “Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity” under the leadership of Cyrus Mody. 

Next to his research on Iceland's energy history and the oil industry in the 1970s, he has also studied “The Desulfurization of the Austrian Energy System” (funded by the Tyrolean Science Fund, 2019-2020) as well as several aspects of Iceland’s political and cultural history. He is the author of Með nótur í farteskinu, which tells the history of foreign musicians in Iceland (Sögufélag, 2016), and co-edited the manuscripts of Anglo-Danish adventurer Jörgen Jörgensen, who took up the reins of government during the Icelandic Revolution of 1809 (Historical Account of a Revolution, University of Iceland Press, 2016).