SR Sebastian James Rose is a historian of technology with a focus on empire, infrastructure, and communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At CryoCultures, his research focuses mainly on histories of space cooling with a particular focus on mapping the Cryosphere. His archival research explores the utilization of cooling technologies during the Cold War in projects of state-building and regimes of warfare and labour.
Before joining CryoCultures, Sebastian worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Loughborough University London on the AHRC-funded project Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Society for the History of Technology’s Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship for his research on British imperial telegraph networks in the Middle East.
He earned his PhD in 2024 at the University of Greenwich, where he was the recipient of the John Charles Maynard Scholarship. His thesis focused on the Indo-European Telegraph Department (IETD) in Iran and the Persian Gulf and examined the role of workers, officials, and infrastructure in the maintenance of empire. In 2024, he held a position as a Research Fellow at Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, researching US telegraph worker movements and trade journals. In 2021, he was shortlisted for the Olivette Otele Prize for his paper exploring the organisation and racialisation of telegraph workers.