Awards

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 2012 fellowship was awarded to Felipe Fernandes Cruz of the University of Texas at Austin, for "Flight of the Toucans: Culture and Technology in the Brazilian Airspace," with the following citation:

The 2012 Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship committee was delighted and stimulated by the abstract of Felipe Cruz's forthcoming dissertation, "Flight of the Toucans: Culture and Technology in the Brazilian Airspace." Cruz tackles a classic topic in the history of technology: the interwar air-mindedness movement and the construction of a large-scale infrastructure for aviation. However, Cruz expands the boundaries of aviation historiography—and the history of technology more generally—in at least three exciting and novel ways.

First, he studies early aviation in a national context—Brazil—where the nation state relied heavily on the airplane to extend its writ into largely ungoverned land and to come to know and control its territory for the first time. Second, Cruz maps the transnational dimensions of the aviation industry as an arena for competition and diplomatic jostling among leading industrial nations and self-consciously industrializing powers. Particularly in the interwar period, the United States and Germany competed to build an aviation infrastructure in Brazil that would serve their national interests, while Brazilian actors leveraged international firms' presence to build local aviation manufacturing expertise—a process that eventually led to the formation of Embraer, one of the top five commercial aircraft manufacturers in the world.

Finally, Cruz keenly and iteratively links the cultural and social history of Brazil's "aerial ocean" with the technologies of aviation, meteorology, and cartography. Sky-borne technologies were potent symbols in twentieth-century Brazil—to the extent that the nation's de novo capital, Brasilia, was designed in the shape of an airplane. And as Cruz pointedly notes, Brazil's urban skies have long been contested sites of social partitioning and stratification. Whether in the air-mindedness movement of the 1930s, or today's helicopter limos and homemade hot-air balloon guerrilla art, Cruz shows how to tell the histories of Brazil's state, society, and airborne technologies all at once.

Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship was endowed in 1999 by Brooke Hindle's wife Helen, his son Donald, and his daughter Margaret in honor of Brooke Hindle and his work in the history of technology. Throughout his career at New York University and at the Museum of History and Technology, Hindle sought tirelessly to integrate the history of technology into mainstream historical currents, and he was likewise passionate in his devotion to encouraging and assisting younger members of the profession. For that reason, the Hindle Fellowship is designated for scholars who are early in their careers. The 2012 Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship was presented to Hermione Giffard for "The Development and Production of Turbojet Aero-Engines in Britain, Germany, and the United States, 1936-1945." The citation:

Hermione Giffard's project offers an exciting, new interpretation of the development of the jet engine. It represents a significant revision of Edward Constant's account in his trailblazing monograph, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution. Not only does Giffard strongly contest the persistent heroic histories, her in-depth archival research also brings to light a complex innovative process that extends across a range of organizations, in industry as well as government agencies, and enriches our understanding of innovation within mid-twentieth-century aero-engineering and beyond. Giffard possesses both the linguistic and technical competences necessary to interrogate her sources rigorously, and she also brings a sophisticated understanding of technological decision-making and political maneuvering to bear on them. In the sample chapter submitted from her Imperial College London...