linaskoglund@fas.harvard.edu

Lina Skoglund studies regime change, state-building, and modernization with a focus on 19th century France. Her dissertation combines natural experiments with micro-level historical data and explores the strategies used by autocrats to take control of state and society. She is also interested in contemporary mobilization against environmental policies in rural France.

Her current project, titled The Revolution Will Not Be Telegraphed, examines how Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte used the Chappe telegraph to overthrow the French Second Republic in December 1851. She collected and digitized 4,000 telegraphic dispatches exchanged between coup-plotters and bureaucrats during the coup to track the collapse of the regime hour-by-hour. Using quasi-random interruptions in communications, she shows that regular information flows from Paris was key to motivate republican bureaucrats across France to shift their loyalty, repress the opposition to the coup, and enact regime change at the local level.

Lina is finishing her PhD in Politics at Princeton, where she is affiliated with the Research Program in Political Economy and the Initiative on Contemporary European Affairs. She holds an MA in Politics from Princeton, as well as a BA and MA (Summa Cum Laude) in Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris. She was a Princeton Prize Fellow in the Social Sciences and a Graduate Fellow in the Digital Humanities.