Awards

NASA Fellowship in the History of Space Technology

The NASA Fellowship in the History of Space Technology, offered by SHOT and supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) History Division, funds either a predoctoral or postdoctoral fellow for up to one academic year to undertake a research project related to the history of space technology. The fellowship supports advanced research related to all aspects of space history, leading to publications on the history of space technology broadly considered, including cultural and intellectual history, institutional history, economic history, history of law and public policy, and history of engineering and management. The 2010 NASA Fellowship was awarded to James L. Johnson. The citation:

The awards committee for the 2010-2011 NASA Fellowship is pleased to announce that the fellowship for the academic year will go to James L. Johnson, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in the History of Science and Technology at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. Johnson is completing his dissertation under the direction of Miriam Levin on "Rockets and the Red Scare: Frank Malina and American Rocketry, 1936-1946." This study promises to make a significant contribution to the historiography of rocketry in the United States by focusing attention on the work of Frank Malina and a group of important rocketeers at Caltech during the 1930s and 1940s. This project is especially pathbreaking because it reflects significant issues in post-World War II America and the origins of the cold war. Like many intellectuals, Malina flirted with Marxist ideology in the interwar years and this led to his being forced out of high-technology military programs. He also, as Johnson makes clear, showed a strong entrepreneurial bent and appreciation for the creative potential of relatively open research environments that went against trends in American industry, academe, and the military after 1947. Thus, Malina's career offers an opportunity for Johnson to elucidate the degree to which individuals were aware that they were not only changing technology but also the very structures through which American scientific research was being conducted—not to mention the ramifications those structural changes may have held for shifting control of research and development decisions away from practitioners during a crucial period in the rise of the United States as a world power.

Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship

This award is given in memory of the cofounder of the Society for the History of Technology, and honors Melvin Kranzberg's many contributions to developing the history of technology as a field of scholarly endeavor and SHOT as a professional organization. The $4,000 award is given to a doctoral student engaged in the preparation of a dissertation on the history of technology, broadly defined, and may be used in any way chosen by the winner to advance the research and writing of that dissertation. The 2010 fellowship was awarded to Lino Camprubi of the University of California, Los Angeles, for "Political Engineering: The History of a Dictatorial State through Science, Technology, and the Landscape (Spain, 1939-1959)," with the following citation:

Lino Camprubi's dissertation project is an ambitious study that develops a new interpretation of the Spanish dictatorship. It makes the history of technology central in its rebuttal of the widespread belief that early Franco Spain was a "monolithic and backward" regime. It examines laboratories, materials, and techniques in the building trades, and follows the products of such building and materials research as they were introduced into the Spanish landscape. Each projected chapter successively enlarges the focus, beginning with the metropolitan laboratory and then proceeding outward to the transformation of a river and a coastal marsh, and finally to the regime's attempted use of engineering to join the European society of nations.

Camprubi's work will illuminate the relationship between technology and the state in a geographic area that is not yet well-represented in the history of technology. It is much more than a case study in a neglected area, however. The wide scope of the project will contribute to the discussion of general concepts of current interest, such as technopolitics or technology and power, technology and environment, technology and science, and, in its discussion...