Aro Velmet

Historian

Aro Velmet is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California. He is interested in how utopias of technological progress are put in the service of statecraft, how experts, interest groups, and subalterns use political technologies, and the unintended consequences of technological development. His book on the history of state data processing in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Europe will be published by MIT Press in 2027. His 2020 book Pasteur’s Empire (Oxford University Press) looks at how microbiology became a tool of colonial governance in Africa and Asia. Since 2021, he has been a part of the Deep Transitions research project at Tartu University. He is an editor of the Eurozine Estonian partner journal Vikerkaar. He was born in Tallinn, Estonia.