Julia Velkova
Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS
Professor of Media and Culture, Linköping University
Research Affiliate, Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara
Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt
Julia Velkova is a media scholar researching digital technologies and media infrastructures from interdisciplinary perspectives grounded in science and technology studies, and anthropological approaches. She is interested in value conflicts, inequalities, ideas of sustainability and contingent temporalities that emerge with the development and dismantling of media infrastructures. Her research is empirically situated in the Nordic and Eastern European contexts with focus on algorithms, data centers, and internet / communication networks. Since 2025 she is full Professor of Media and Culture at the Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University.
Velkova defended her Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in 2018, with a study of the politics of computer graphics animation software, for which she won the second prize for best Ph.D. thesis in the field in Sweden in 2019. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki (2018–2020); and associate professor at TEMA, Linköping University (2020–2025) where she founded and co-directs the DataLab. She is the co-editor of several books, including Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations (University of Illinois Press, 2023), and is currently completing an edited collection on technological endings with Marisa Cohn (forthcoming with Open Humanities Press). As PI, Velkova has received grants from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation; CHANSE/FORTE; and the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.
Velkova’s Pro Futura project, “When Communication Networks Come to Die: Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Infrastructural Dismantling” explores infrastructure endings and how they relate to questions of power, regimes of value, and citizenship. Her empiric focus is on the ongoing decommissioning of the landline telephone network in Sweden.
Julia Velkova is in residence in the academic year 2025-26.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.